THEOLOGY AND THE
SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS
A STUDY OF THE RELATIONS OF THE
SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS TO THEOLOGY
BY
HENRY CHURCHILL KING
PROFESSOR OF THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY
IN OBERLIN COLLEGE
SECOND EDITION
HODDER & STOUGHTON
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
Copyright, 1902
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Set up and electrotyped September, 1902
Reprinted February, 1904;
July, 1907; August, 1910; April, 1912.
To the Members of the
Harvard Summer School of Theology
OF THE YEAR 1901
IN RECOGNITION OF THEIR INTEREST IN THE LECTURES
THAT FORMED THE BASIS OF THIS BOOK
PREFACE
There is no attempt in this book to present a complete system of theology, though much of such a system is passed in review, but only to study a special phase of theological thinking. The precise theme of the book is the relations of the social consciousness to theology. This is the subject upon which the writer was asked to lecture at the Harvard Summer School of Theology of 1901; and the book has grown out of the lectures there given. In preparing the book for the press, however, the lecture form has been entirely abandoned, and considerable material added.
The importance of the theme seems to justify a somewhat thorough-going treatment. If one believes at all in the presence of God in history—and the Christian can have no doubt here—he must be profoundly interested in such a phenomenon as the steady growth of the social consciousness. Hardly any inner characteristic of our time has a stronger historical justification than that consciousness; and it has carried the reason and conscience of the men of this generation in rare degree. Having its own comparatively independent development, and yet making an ethical demand that is thoroughly Christian, it furnishes an almost ideal standpoint from which to review our theological statements, and, at the same time, a valuable test of their really Christian quality.
In attempting, then, a careful study of the relations of the social consciousness to theology, this book aims, first, definitely to get at the real meaning of the social consciousness as the theologian must view it, and so to bring clearly into mind the unconscious assumptions of the social consciousness itself; and then to trace out the influence of the social consciousness upon the conception of religion, and upon theological doctrine. The larger portion of the book is naturally given to the influence upon theological doctrine; and to make the discussion here as pointed as possible, the different elements of the social consciousness are considered separately.
It should be noted, however, that the question raised is not the historical one, How, as a matter of fact, has the social consciousness modified the conception of religion or the statement of theological doctrine? but the theoretical one, How should the social consciousness naturally affect religion and doctrine? In this sense, the result might be called, in President Hyde's phrase, a "social theology"; but, as I believe that the social consciousness is at bottom only a true sense of the fully personal, I prefer myself to think of the present book as only carrying out in more detail the contention of my Reconstruction in Theology—that theology should aim at a restatement of doctrine in strictly personal terms. So conceived, in spite of its casual origin, this book follows very naturally upon the previous book. Some of the same topics necessarily recur here; and references to the Reconstruction have been freely made, in order to avoid all unnecessary repetition.
That this social sense of the fully personal has finally a real and definite contribution to make to theology, I cannot doubt. I can only hope that the present discussion may be found at least suggestive, particularly in the analysis of the social consciousness, and in the treatment of mysticism and of the ethical in religion, as well as in the consideration of the special influence of the elements of the social consciousness upon the restatement of doctrine. Of the doctrinal applications, the application to the problem of redemption may be considered, perhaps, of most significance.
HENRY CHURCHILL KING.
Oberlin College, June, 1902.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
page
The Theme[1]
THE REAL MEANING OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS FOR THEOLOGY
INTRODUCTION
The Point of View of the Theologian[5]
CHAPTER I
The Definition of the Social Consciousness[9]
- The Sense of the Like-Mindedness of Men[9]
- The Sense of the Mutual Influence of Men[11]
- The Sense of the Value and Sacredness of the Person[16]
- The Sense of Obligation[18]
- The Sense of Love[20]
CHAPTER II
The Inadequacy of the Analogy of the Organism as an Expression of the Social Consciousness[23]
- The Value of the Analogy[23]
- The Inevitable Inadequacy of the Analogy[24]
- The Analogy Tested by the Definition of the Social Consciousness[27]
CHAPTER III
The Necessity of the Facts of Which the Social Consciousness is the Reflection,
If Ideal Interests are to be Supreme[29]
CHAPTER IV
The Ultimate Explanation and Ground of the Social Consciousness[35]
- How can it be, Metaphysically, that we do Influence One Another? [35]
- What is Required for the Final Positive Justification of the Social Consciousness, as Ethical?[44]
THE INFLUENCE OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS UPON
THE CONCEPTION OF RELIGION
Introduction[53]
CHAPTER V
The Opposition of the Social Consciousness to the Falsely Mystical[55]
- What is the Falsely Mystical?[55]
- The Objections of the Social Consciousness to the Falsely Mystical[57]
CHAPTER VI
The Emphasis of the Social Consciousness Upon the Personal Relation in Religion,
and so Upon the Truly Mystical[66]
- The Social Consciousness Tends Positively to Emphasize the Personal Relation in Religion[66]
- The Social Consciousness thus Keeps the Truly Mystical[70]
CHAPTER VII
The Thorough Ethicizing of Religion[86]
- The Pressure of the Problem[86]
- The Statement of the Problem[87]
-
The Answer[89]
- Involved in Relation to Christ[89]
- The Divine Will Felt in the Ethical Command[90]
- Involved in the Nature of God's Gifts[91]
- Communion with God, Through Harmony with His Ethical Will[92]
- The Vision of God for the Pure in Heart[92]
- Sharing the Life of God[93]
- Christ, as Satisfying Our Highest Claims on Life[94]
- The Vision of the Riches of the Life of Christ, Ethically Conditioned[96]
- The Moral Law, as a Revelation of the Love of God[98]
CHAPTER VIII
The Emphasis of the Social Consciousness Upon the Historically Christian[102]
- The Social Consciousness Needs Historical Justification[102]
- Christianity's Response to this Need[103]
THE INFLUENCE OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS UPON
THEOLOGICAL DOCTRINE
CHAPTER IX
General Results[105]
- The Conception of Theology in Personal Terms[106]
- The Fatherhood of God, as the Determining Principle in Theology[109]
- Christ's Own Social Emphases[111]
- The Reflection in Theology of the Changes in the Conception of Religion[113]
CHAPTER X
The Influence of the Deepening Sense of the Like-Mindedness of Men Upon Theology[115]
- No Prime Favorites with God[116]
- The Great Universal Qualities and Interests, the Most Valuable[117]
- Essential Likeness Under very Diverse Forms[121]
- As Applied to the Question of Immortality[124]
- Consequent Larger Sympathy with Men, Faith in Men, and Hope for Men[127]
- Judgment According to Light, and the Moral Reality of the Future Life[132]
CHAPTER XI
The Influence of the Deepening Sense of the Mutual Influence of Men Upon Theology[136]
- The Real Unity of the Race[136]
- Deepening the Sense of Sin[139]
- Mutual Influence for Good in the Attainment of Character[145]
- Mutual Influence for Good in our Personal Relation to God[160]
- Mutual Influence for Good in Confessions of Faith[167]
- The Consequent Importance of the Doctrine of the Church[177]
CHAPTER XII
The Influence of the Deepening Sense of the Value and Sacredness of the Person
Upon Theology[179]
- The Recognition of the Personal in Man[180]
-
The Recognition of the Personal in Christ[184]
- Christ, a Personal Revelation of God[184]
- Emphasizing the Moral and Spiritual in Asserting the Supremacy of Christ[185]
-
The Moral and Spiritual Grounds of the Supremacy of
Christ[188]
- (1) The Greatest in the Greatest Sphere[188]
- (2) The Sinless and Impenitent One[192]
- (3) Consciously Rises to the Highest Ideal[194]
- (4) Realizes the Character of God[195]
- (5) Consciously Able to Redeem All Men[196]
-
(6) Complete Normality under this Transcendent
God-Consciousness
and Sense of Mission[197] - (7) The Only Person Who can call out Absolute Trust[198]
- (8) The One, in Whom God Certainly Finds Us[199]
- (9) The Ideal Realized[200]
- Christ's Double Uniqueness[201]
- The Increasing Sense of Our Kinship with Christ, and of His Reality[205]
-
The Recognition of the Personal in God.[207]
-
The Steady Carrying Through of the Completely Personal
in the Conception of God. Guarding the Conception[208] - God is Always the Completely Personal God[212]
- Deepening the Thought of the Fatherhood of God[218]
- As to the Doctrine of a Social Trinity[222]
-
Preëminent Reverence for Personality, Characterizing
all God's Relations with Men[226]
-
The Steady Carrying Through of the Completely Personal
THEOLOGY AND THE SOCIAL
CONSCIOUSNESS
INTRODUCTION
THE THEME
No theologian can be excused to-day from a careful study of the relations of theology and the social consciousness. Whether this study becomes a formal investigation or not, the social consciousness is so deep and significant a phenomenon in the ethical life of our time, that it cannot be ignored by the theologian who means to bring his message to men really home. This book is written in the conviction that, while men are thus moved as never before by a deep sense of mutual influence and obligation, they have also as deep and genuine an interest as ever in the really greatest questions of religion and theology. Interests so significant and so akin cannot long remain isolated in the mind. They are certain soon profoundly to influence each other. And this mutual influence of theology and the social consciousness form the theme of this book.
Two questions are naturally involved in this theme. First: Has theology given any help, or has it any help to give, to the social consciousness?—the question of the first division of the book. Second: Has the social consciousness made any contribution, or has it any contribution to make, to theology?—the question of the second and third divisions. That is to say: On the one hand, Have the great facts which theology studies any help to give to the man who faces the problem of social progress—of the steady elevation of the race? On the other hand, Has the great fact of the immensely quickened social consciousness of our time, with all that it means, any help to give to the theologian in his attempt to bring the great Christian truths really home to men, to make them more real, more rational, more vital?
Or again: On the one hand, do theological doctrines—the most adequate statements we can make of the great Christian truths—best explain and best ground the social consciousness, so as best to bring our entire thought in this sphere of the social into unity? Is the Christian truth so great that it not only includes all that is true in this new social consciousness—is fully able to take it up into itself and to make it feel at home there—but also, so great that it alone can give the social consciousness its fullest meaning, alone enable it to understand itself, and alone furnish it adequate motive and power? Is the social consciousness, in truth, only a disguised statement of Christian convictions, and does it really require the Christian religion and its thoughtful expression to complete itself? Must the social consciousness say, when it comes to full self-knowledge,—I am myself an unmeaning and unjustified by-product, if there is not a God in the full Christian sense? and, so saying, confirm again the great Christian truths? This is the question of the first division.
On the other hand, since the task of any given theologian is necessarily temporary, and since any marked modification of the consciousness of men will inevitably demand some restatement of theological doctrine, the question here becomes—To what changed points of view in religion and theology, to what restatements of doctrine, and so to what truer appreciation of Christian truth, does the new social consciousness naturally lead? How do the affirmations of the social consciousness, as the outcome of a careful, inductive study of the social evolution of the race, affect our theological statements? This is the question of the second and third divisions of the book.
Our discussion must of course assume and build on the conclusions of sociology, and of New Testament theology, especially the conclusions concerning the social teaching of Jesus.
THE REAL MEANING OF THE SOCIAL
CONSCIOUSNESS FOR THEOLOGY
INTRODUCTION
THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE THEOLOGIAN
First, then, what is the real meaning of the social consciousness, as the theologian must view it? The answer to this question involves a preliminary one: What is the point of view of the theologian in any investigation? One can only give his own answer.
First of all, the theologian, as such, is an interpreter, not a tracer of causal connections. He builds everywhere upon the scientific investigator, and takes from him the statement of facts and processes. With these he has primarily nothing to do. With reference to the social consciousness, therefore, he does not attempt to do over again the work of the sociologist; he asks only, What does the social consciousness, in the light of the whole of life and thought, mean; not, How did it come about?
The theologian, too, is a believer in the supremacy of spiritual interests; this is his central contention. He affirms strenuously, with the scientific worker, the place and value of the mechanical; but he is certain that the mechanical can understand itself even, only as it is seen to be simple means, and thus clearly subordinate in significance. His problem is, therefore, everywhere, that of ideal interpretation, not of mechanical explanation. But, while he has nothing to do with the scientific tracing of immediate causal connections, he recognizes causality itself as requiring an ultimate explanation, that cannot be mechanically given. The theologian must be in this, then, an ideal interpreter, and an inquirer after the ultimate cause.
The theologian assumes, moreover, the legitimacy and value of the fact of religion; for theology is simply the thoughtful, comprehensive, and unified expression of what religion means to us. The meaning of the social consciousness to the theologian involves, therefore, at once the question of its relation to religious conviction.
The point of view of the Christian theologian involves, besides, the reality of the personal God in personal relation to persons. Theology is in earnest in its thought of God, and knows that God is everywhere to be taken into account; that, if there is a God at all, he is not to be exiled into some corner of his universe, but is intimately concerned in all, is at the very heart of all; and that, therefore, it is not a matter of merely curious interest or of subsidiary inquiry, whether we are to look at our questions with God in mind.
Finally, the Christian theologian tries everywhere to make his point of view the point of view of Christ. The theology, upon which he ultimately stakes his all, is Christ's theology. He knows that there is much concerning which he cannot refuse to think, but upon which Christ has not expressed himself either explicitly or by clear inference; but in all this unavoidable supplementary thinking he aims to be absolutely loyal to the spirit of Christ.
From this point of view of the Christian theologian, now, what does the social consciousness mean? The answer may be given under four heads: (1) the definition of the social consciousness; (2) the inadequacy of the analogy of the organism, as an expression of the social consciousness; (3) the necessity of the facts, of which the social consciousness is the reflection, if ideal interests are to be supreme; (4) the ultimate explanation and ground of the social consciousness.
These four topics form the subjects of the four chapters of the first division of our inquiry.
CHAPTER I
THE DEFINITION OF SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS
The simplest and probably the most accurate single expression we can give to the social consciousness, is to say that it is a growing sense of the real brotherhood of men. But five elements seem plainly involved in this, and may be profitably separated in our thought, if that is to be clear and definite:—a deepening sense (1) of the likeness or like-mindedness of men, (2) of their mutual influence, (3) of the value and sacredness of the person, (4) of mutual obligation, and (5) of love.
I. THE SENSE OF THE LIKE-MINDEDNESS OF MEN[1]
If a society is "a group of like-minded individuals," if the "all-essential" requisites for coöperation are "like-mindedness and consciousness of kind," as Giddings tells us, then certainly a prime element in the social consciousness is likeness and the sense of it—a growing sense of the mental and moral resemblance and "potential resemblance" of all men, and of all classes of men, though not equality of powers.
"Equality of need" among men, too,[2] to which sociology comes as one of its surest conclusions, implies a common capacity, even if in varying degrees, to enter into the most fundamental interests of life, and so points unmistakably to the essential likeness of men in the most important things.
So, too, sociology's unquestioning assertion that both smaller and larger groups of men constantly tend toward unity, assumes potential resemblance.
And the uniform experience and prescription of social workers, that really knowing "how the other half lives" brings increasing sympathy, also affirm the fundamental likeness of men. Every painstaking investigation of a social question comes out at some point or other with a fresh discovery of a previously hidden, underlying resemblance between classes of men.
From the careful, inductive study of social evolution, too, the men of our day see, as no other generation has seen, that the great force always and everywhere at work in that evolution has been likeness and the consciousness of it.
For all these reasons, this generation believes, as men never believed before, in the essential like-mindedness of men; and this deepening sense of the like-mindedness of men is certainly one element in the modern social consciousness.
II. THE SENSE OF THE MUTUAL INFLUENCE OF MEN
A second element in the social consciousness, and, perhaps, that which has most of all characterized it through the larger period of its growth, is the strong sense of the mutual influence of men—that we are all "members one of another."
1. Contributing Lines of Thought.—It is worth seeing how firmly planted the idea is. Several lines of thought have united to induce men to emphasize—perhaps even to over-emphasize—this way of thinking of society. The influence of natural science, in the first place, has been inevitably in this direction. Its root idea of the universality of law forces upon one the thought of a world which is a coherent whole, a unity with universal forces in it, in which every part is inextricably connected with every other. So, too, the acceptance of the theory of evolution has led science to regard the whole history of the physical universe as an organic growth.
Psychology, also, with its present-day emphasis, in Baldwin and Royce, upon the constant presence and fundamental character of imitation, and its insistence upon the still more fundamental impulsiveness of consciousness which Dewey believes underlies imitation,[3] is really proclaiming exactly this element of the social consciousness. And the whole assertion by the later psychology of the unity of man—mind and body, and of the complex intertwining of all the functions of the mind, is in closest harmony with a similar view of society.
Philosophy, too, is exerting all along a half-unconscious pressure toward the thought of the organic unity of society. That philosophy may exist at all, it must start from the assumption of a universe, a real unity of truth, and its problem is to find a discerned unity. It knows no unrelated being, and, consequently, whether it theoretically accepts the formulation or not, it must admit that, as a matter of fact, to be is to be in relations. It asserts as a universal fact, what natural science and psychology both affirm in their own respective spheres, the concrete relatedness of all. It cannot well deny the same thought when applied to society. Its repeated attempts, moreover, to conceive all as a developing unity, and the profound influence of the analogy of the organism upon its history, both further sustain the organic view of society.
Christianity, as well, has been a powerful factor in this direction from the beginning, for it really first gave the Idea of Humanity.[4]
2. The Threefold Form of the Conviction.—Sustained, now, by all these movements in natural science, psychology, philosophy, and Christianity, this thought of the mutual influence of men has taken three forms: that mutual influence is inevitable, isolation impossible; that mutual influence is desirable, isolation to be shunned; that mutual influence is indispensable, isolation blighting.
(1) This second element in the social consciousness has meant, then, in the first place, a growing sense of the inevitableness of the mutual influence of all men, and of all classes of men; that we are all parts of one whole, each part unavoidably affected by every other; that we are bound up in one bundle of life with all men, and cannot live an isolated life if we would; that we do influence one another whether we will or not, and tend unconsciously to draw others to our level and are ourselves drawn toward theirs; that we joy and suffer together whether we will or not, and grow or deteriorate together.
(2) But the mutual influence of men means more than this: not only that we do inevitably affect one another in living out our own life, but a growing sense of the fact that we are obviously not intended to come to our best in independence of one another; that we are made on so large a plan that we cannot come to our best alone; that we are evidently made for personal relations, and that, therefore, largeness of life for ourselves depends on our entering into the life of others.
(3) But even more than this is true. It is not only that entering into the life of others is a help in my life, it is the great help, the one great means, the indispensable, the essential condition of all largeness of life; it is the very meaning of life,—life itself. We are to find our life only in losing our life. Life is the fulfilment of relations. When we try to run away from the variety and complexity of these relations, we are running away from life itself. The indispensableness of these relations to others is assumed, also, in the assertion by the sociologist of an evolution toward a society, at once more and more complex, and more and more perfect.
But if I grow in the growth of another, the other grows in my growth. If the only thing of value that I can finally give is myself, the value of that gift depends upon the largeness and richness of the self given. For love's own sake, therefore, I must grow, must strive to bring to its highest perfection that work which is given me to do. A person is a social being called to contribute to the whole, in the line of his own best possibilities. One's largest ministry to others is to be rendered, then, through sacred regard for one's own calling, considered as exactly his place of largest service. Or, to put it the other way: I can come to my best only in work so great and in associations so large that I may lose myself in them in perfect objectivity.
The mutual influence of men, therefore, is unavoidable, is desirable, is indispensable; isolation impossible, hindering, blighting. This is the true solidarity of the race, in which there is no fiction, no hiding in the inconceivable, and no pretense.
III. THE SENSE OF THE VALUE AND SACREDNESS OF THE PERSON
The third element in the social consciousness, the sense of the value and sacredness of the person, follows naturally from the sense of like-mindedness and of mutual influence, but needs distinct and emphatic statement.
It is less easily separable than the other elements named, and, indeed, may be made to include all the others, and does, in a way, carry all with it. Thus broadly conceived, it has seemed to the writer that—with the return to the historical Christ—it might well be called the most notable moral characteristic of our time.[5] But, though less easily and definitely discriminated, one who knows deeply the modern social consciousness would surely feel that the very heart of it had been omitted, if this growing sense of the value and sacredness of the person did not come to strong expression. Reverence for personality—the steadily deepening sense that every person has a value not to be measured in anything else, and is in himself sacred to God and man—this it is which marks unmistakably every step in the progress of the individual and of the race. Without it, whatever the other marks of civilization, you have only tyranny and slavery; with it, though every trace of luxury and scientific invention be lacking, you have the perfection of human relations.
This sense of the value and sacredness of the person not only characterizes increasingly the whole social and moral evolution of the race, but it is to be seen in the clearly conscious demand for equality of rights, and, especially—to take a single example—in the growing recognition that the child is an individual with his own rights; that he has a personality of his own of a sanctity inviolable by the parent; that there are clear bounds beyond which no one may go without personal outrage. The recognition by psychology of respect for personality as one of the three or four most fundamental conditions—if not the most essential of all—of happiness, of character, and of influence, is explicit confirmation of the truth of this element of the social consciousness.
IV. THE SENSE OF OBLIGATION
But the elements of the social consciousness already named lead directly to a growing sense of obligation. Every man carries in himself his only possible standard of measurement of all else. A growing sense of the likeness of other men to himself quickens at once, therefore, the sense of obligation, and leads naturally to the Golden Rule. Recognition of mutual influence, too, inevitably carries with it a deeper sense of obligation; for, if we do affect others constantly, then we are manifestly under obligation not only to do direct service to others, but so to order our own lives as to help, not to hinder, others. The sense of the value and sacredness of the person plainly looks to the same deepening of obligation.
As an element of the social consciousness, the sense of obligation means for a given individual, a growing sense of responsibility for all; and for society at large an increase in the number of those who feel the obligation to serve.
The growth in each of these directions cannot be questioned. There is no privileged class, in whose own consciences there is not being recognized more and more the right of the claim that they must justify themselves by service which shall be as unique as their privilege. In consequence, the conception of the governing classes is steadily changing, for both the governed and the governing, to some recognition of Christ's principle, that he who would be first must be servant of all. The sharp insistence of the sociologist that "organization must be for the organized" expresses the same thought. One must add sociology's double assertion, that society is really advancing toward its goal, and yet that a chief condition of the progress of society is unselfish leadership.[6] This can only mean that there is, increasingly, unselfish leadership, more and more of conscious, willing coöperation on the part of men in forwarding the social evolution.
None of us can return to the older attitude of comparative indifference, nor can we honestly defend it. We do have obligations and we own them; we are judging ourselves increasingly by Christ's test of ministering love.
V. THE SENSE OF LOVE
And the social consciousness ends necessarily in love, in the broader, ethical meaning of that word. We shall never feel that the social consciousness is complete, short of real love. All the other elements of the social consciousness lead to love and are included in it. Even the sociologist must bring in as necessary results of the consciousness of kind—sympathy, affection, and desire for the recognition of others;[7] and he finds these always more or less distinctly at work among men.
These further considerations from the study of evolution confirm this result: that man is preëminently the social animal;[8] that with man we have clearly reached the stage of persons and of personal relations;[9] that the very existence and development of man required love at every step;[10] and that the chief moral significance of man's prolonged infancy is probably to be found in the necessary calling out of love.[11]
So, too, it has become constantly more and more clear that our obligation, what we owe to others, is ourselves; and the giving of the self is love. It seems to be thrust home upon social workers everywhere that there is no solution of any social problem without a personal self-giving in some way on the part of some; that there is no cheaper way than this very costly one of love, of the giving of ourselves—whether in the family, or in charity, or in criminology.
The point, already noted, that the progress of society depends on leaders who will serve with unselfish devotion, is only another emphasis upon love as an indispensable element of the social consciousness.
And the social goal—equality, brotherhood, liberty, when these terms are given any adequate ethical content—is absolutely unthinkable in any really vital sense without love.
Any attempted definition of love, moreover, resolves at once into what we mean by the social consciousness. If we define love as the giving of self, this is exactly what, with growing clearness and insistence, the social consciousness demands. If with Herrmann we call love, "joy in personal life"—joy, that is, in the revelation of personal life, this can only come in that trustful, reverent, self-surrendering association to which the social consciousness exhorts. If with Edwards we call love, willing the highest and completest good of all, we reach the same result. Or if with Christ in the Beatitudes, or with Paul in the thirteenth of I Corinthians, we study the characteristics of love, we shall hardly doubt that a complete social consciousness must have these marks of love.
These elements, then, make up the social consciousness: the sense of like-mindedness, of mutual influence, of the value and sacredness of the person, of obligation, and of love; and all these, with their implied demands, only point to what a person must be if he is to be fully personal.
With this definition in mind, we may now ask, whether the analogy of the organism can adequately express the social consciousness.
[1] Cf. Giddings, Elements of Sociology, pp. 6, 10, 65, 66, 77.
[2] Cf. Giddings, Op. cit., p. 324.
[3] See The New World, Sept., 1898, p. 516.
[4] Cf. Lotze, The Microcosmus, Vol. II, p. 211.
[5] See King, Reconstruction in Theology, Chap. IX, pp, 169 ff.
[6] See Giddings, Op. cit., pp. 302, 320-322.
[7] Cf. Giddings, Op. cit., pp. 65, 66.
[8] Cf. Giddings, Op. cit., p. 241.
[9] See King, Reconstruction in Theology, pp. 92-96.
[10] Cf. Drummond, The Ascent of Man, pp. 272 ff.
[11] Cf. John Fiske, The Destiny of Man, p. 74; Drummond, Op. cit., p. 279 ff.
CHAPTER II
THE INADEQUACY OF THE ANALOGY OF THE ORGANISM
AS AN EXPRESSION OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS[12]
I. THE VALUE OF THE ANALOGY
The analogy of the organism has played so large a part in the history of thought, especially in the consideration of ethical and social questions, that it is well worth while to ask exactly how far this analogy is adequate, although the danger of the abuse of the analogy is probably somewhat less than formerly.
It may be said at once that it is, undoubtedly, the very best illustration of these social relations that we can draw from nature, and it is of real value. It has had, moreover, as already indicated, a most influential and largely honorable history in the development of the thought of men. Its classical expression is in the epoch-making twelfth chapter of I Corinthians, which makes so plain the ethical applications of the analogy.
II. THE INEVITABLE INADEQUACY OF THE ANALOGY
1. Comes from the Sub-personal World.—But it ought clearly to be seen, on the other hand, that, considered as a complete expression of the social consciousness, it is necessarily inadequate; and it is of moment that we should not be dominated by it. Too often it has been made to cover the entire ground, as though in itself it were a complete expression and final explanation of the social consciousness, instead of a quite incomplete illustration. For, in the first place, the very fact that the analogy comes from the physical world, from the sub-personal realm, makes it certain that it must fail at vital points in the expression of what is peculiarly a personal and ethical fact. We cannot safely argue directly from the physical illustration to ethical propositions.
2. Access to Reality, Only Through Ourselves.—Moreover, in this day of extraordinary attention to the physical world, it is particularly important that we should keep constantly in mind that we have direct access to reality only in ourselves; that man is himself necessarily the only key which we can use for any ultimate understanding of anything; or, as Paulsen puts it, "I know reality as it is in itself, in so far as I am real myself, or in so far as it is, or is like, that which I am, namely, spirit."[13] We are not to forget that, in very truth, we know better what we mean by persons and personal relations, than we do what we mean by members of a body and by organic relations; and, further, that in point of fact, all those metaphysical notions by which we strive to think things are ultimately derived from ourselves; and that then we illogically turn back upon our own minds, from which all these notions came, to explain the mind in the same secondary way in which we explain other things.
3. Mistaken Passion for Construing Everything.—Natural science, with its sole problem of the tracing of immediate causal connections, naturally provokes a persistent, but nevertheless thoroughly mistaken, "passion," as Lotze calls it,[14] "for construing everything,"—even the most real and final reality, spirit; which wishes to see even this real and final reality explained as the mechanical result of the combination of simpler elements, themselves, it is to be noted, finally absolutely inexplicable. Such perverse attempts will be widely hailed, by many who do not understand themselves, as highly scientific. And one who refuses to enter upon such investigations will be criticized by such minds as "hardly getting into grips with his subject."
But it is a false application of the scientific instinct that leads one to seek mechanical explanation for the final reality, or that urges to precision of formulation beyond that warranted by the data. It is from exactly this falsely scientific bias that theology needs deliverance. "For," as Aristotle reminds us, "it is the mark of a man of culture to try to attain exactness in each kind of knowledge just so far as the nature of the subject allows." There is a wise agnosticism that is violated alike by negative and by positive dogmatism. It is often overlooked that there is an over-wise radicalism that assumes a knowledge of the depth of the finite and infinite, quite as insistent and dogmatic as the view it supposes itself to be opposing. "I know it is not so," it ought not to need to be said, is not agnosticism.
The guiding principle in a truly scientific theology is this, as Lotze suggests: Just so far as changing action depends upon altering conditions, we have explanatory and constructive problems to solve, and no farther. No philosophical view can do without a simply given reality. And we shall never succeed in understanding by what machinery reality is manufactured—in "deducing the whole positive content of reality from mere modifications of formal conditions."[15]
We shall not allow ourselves to be misled, therefore, by the scientific sound of the detailed application of the analogy of the organism to the facts of the social consciousness. And it is a satisfaction to see that the clearest sociological writers are coming to agree that there is strictly no "social mind" that can be affirmed to exist as a separate reality, supposed to answer to society conceived in its totality as an organism.
III. THE ANALOGY TESTED BY THE DEFINITION
OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS
When, now, we test the analogy of the organism by its competency to express the full meaning of the social consciousness, as it has been defined, we must say that the analogy but feebly expresses the likeness of men; it best expresses the inevitableness of mutual influence, though even here there is no understandable ultimate explanation; it fairly expresses the desirableness and indispensableness of mutual influence, but, of course, with entire lack of ethical meaning; and it quite fails to express the sense of the value and the sacredness of the person, the sense of obligation, and the sense of love. We need to see and feel exactly these shortcomings, if we are not to abuse the analogy. There is no social consciousness that will hold water that does not rest on what Phillips Brooks called "a healthy and ineradicable individualism," in the sense of the recognition of the fully personal. We are spirits, not organisms, and society is a society of persons, not an organism, in a strict sense. Why should we wish to make society less significant than it is?
[12] Cf. King, Op. cit., pp. 92 ff., 179.
[13] Introduction to Philosophy, p. 373.
[14] The Microcosmus, Vol. I, p. 262.
[15] Lotze, The Microcosmus, Vol. II, pp. 649 ff.
CHAPTER III
THE NECESSITY OF THE FACTS, OF WHICH THE SOCIAL
CONSCIOUSNESS IS THE REFLECTION, IF IDEAL
INTERESTS ARE TO BE SUPREME
I. THE QUESTION
With this positive and negative definition of the social consciousness in our minds, a third question immediately suggests itself to one who wishes to go to the bottom of our theme. Why must the facts, of which the social consciousness is the reflection, be as they are if ideal interests are to be supreme? What has a theodicy to say as to these facts? Why, that is, from the point of view of the ideal—of religion and theology—why are we constituted so alike? so that we must influence one another? so that the results of our actions necessarily go over into the lives of others? so that the innocent suffer with the guilty and the guilty profit with the righteous? so that we must recognize everywhere the claim of others? so that we must respect their personality? and so that we must love them?
II. OTHERWISE NO MORAL WORLD AT ALL
The answer to all these world-old questions may perhaps be contained in the single statement, that otherwise we should have no moral world at all. There would be no thinkable moral universe, but rather as many worlds as there are individuals, having no more to do with one another than the chemical reactions going on in a set of test-tubes.
1. The Prerequisites of a Moral World. For our human thinking, assuredly, there are certain prerequisites, that the world may be at all a sphere for moral training and action. What are these prerequisites for a moral world? There must be, in the first place, a sphere of universal law, to count on, within which all actions take place. In a lawless world, action could hardly take on any significance—least of all ethical significance. That freedom itself should mean anything in outward expression, there must be the possibility of intelligent use of means toward the ends chosen.
There must be, in the second place, some real ethical freedom, some power of moral initiative. We need not quarrel about the terms used; but, as Paulsen intimates, no serious ethical writer ever doubted that men have at least some power to shape their own characters.[16] Without that assumption, we have a whole world of ideas and ideals—many of them the realest facts in the world to us—that have no legitimate excuse for being, that are simple insanities of the most inexplicable sort. The very meaning of the personality, indeed, which the social consciousness must demand for men, is some real existence for self, that is, some real self-consciousness and moral initiative.
And freedom is not enough; there must be also some power of accomplishment. To ascribe mere volition to man seems, it has been justly said, sophistical. Results are needed to reveal the character of our acts, even to ourselves—to make that character real. Lotze's charge that the world is imperfect because it might have been so made that only good designs could be carried out, or so that the results of evil volitions would be at once corrected,[17] is itself similarly sophistical. Such a world, in which the outward results of action never appear, would be but a play-world after all—only a nursery of babes not yet capable of character. It could be no fit world for moral training.
And still more, not less, must this law of the necessary results of actions hold in our relations to other persons. There can be, least of all, a moral universe where we are not members one of another. Character, in any form we can conceive it, could not then exist. Our best, as well as our worst, possibilities are involved in these necessary mutual relations. Moral character has meaning only in personal relations. The results, therefore, which follow upon action, if the character of our deed is to have reality for us, must be chiefly personal. The realm of character has fearful possibilities. This is no play-world. We can cause and be caused suffering, and our sin necessarily carries the suffering, if not the sin, of others with it.
2. The Ideal World Requires, thus, the Facts of the Social Consciousness.—All this could be changed in any vital way only by shutting up every soul absolutely to itself, and with that result life has simply ceased.
For we cannot really conceive a person as having any reason for being without such relations. He would be constantly baffled at every point, for he is made for persons and personal relations. Love, too, the highest source of both character and happiness, requires everywhere personal relations. Religion itself, as a sharing of the life of God, would be impossible without some relation to others; for God, at least, could not be separated from the life of all. That is, persons, love, religion, in such a world, have gone.
This, then, simply means that the ideal world ceases to be, with the denial of the facts that the social consciousness reflects. We must be full persons, social beings in the entire meaning demanded by the social consciousness—hard as the consequences involved often are—if ideal interests are to be supreme. Indeed, the very moral judgment, that incessantly prompts the problem of evil for every one of us, is required, for its own existence, to assume the validity of the relations about which it questions. For it complains, for the most part, of those facts that follow inevitably from the necessary mutual influence of men; but the chief sources of the joy it requires, that it may justify the world, lie in these same mutual relations. It assumes, thus, in its claims on the world, the validity and worth of the very relations of which it complains in its criticism of the world. Or, slightly to vary the statement, the major premise, even of pessimism, is that a really justifiable world must have worth in the joy it yields in personal life, impossible out of the personal relations of a real moral universe. And there can be no moral universe without the facts reflected in the social consciousness. The ideal world requires, then, the facts of the social consciousness.
[16] System of Ethics, pp. 467 ff.
[17] Philosophy of Religion, p. 125.
CHAPTER IV
THE ULTIMATE EXPLANATION AND GROUND OF THE
SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS
The most important and fundamental inquiry as to the possible help of theology to the social consciousness still remains: What is the ultimate explanation and ground of the social consciousness? This question includes two: (1) How can it be metaphysically that we do influence one another? (2) What is required for the final positive justification of the social consciousness as ethical? Theology's answer to both questions is found in the being and character of God, the creative and moral source of all.
I. HOW CAN IT BE, METAPHYSICALLY, THAT WE DO
INFLUENCE ONE ANOTHER?
First, then, how can it be that we do influence one another? What is the final explanation of the constant fact of our reciprocal action? For in our final thinking we may not ignore this question.
1. Not Due to the Physical Fact of Race-Connection.—It may be worth while saying, first, that the physical fact of race-connection, if that could be proved, would be no sufficient explanation. The race may, or may not, be dependent upon a single pair, but in any case this is not the essential connection. The race is one by virtue of its essential likeness, however that comes about. Men might have sprung out of the ground in absolute individual independence of one another, and yet if there were such actual like-mindedness as now exists, the race would be as truly one as it now is, and as capable of reciprocal action, and its members under the same obligation to one another. No ideal interest is at stake, then, in the question of the actual physical unity of the race as descended from one pair.
One may say, of course, that the physical unity of the race would naturally result, according to the laws apparently prevailing in the animal world, in likeness. And this may, therefore, seem to him the most natural proximate explanation. But, even so, it is well to know that our entire moral interest is in the essential likeness and mutual influence of men, however brought about, and not in the physical unity of men. Theology has no occasion to continue its earlier excessive and quite fundamental emphasis upon this physical unity. Moreover, such an explanation is necessarily but proximate. Back of it lies the deeper question, Why just these laws, and modes of procedure?
2. We are not to Over-Emphasize the Principle of Heredity.—Nor can theology, from any point of view, afford to over-emphasize the principle of heredity if it wishes to keep human initiative at all. It is a dangerous alliance which the old-school theology with its racial sin in Adam has been so ready to make with the principle of heredity. That principle, as they wish to use it, proves quite too much; and careful thinkers, really awake to ideal interests, may well rejoice in the comparative relief which science itself, through the probably somewhat exaggerated protest of the Weismann or Neo-Darwinian school, seems likely to afford from the incubus of a grossly exaggerated heredity. The main interest for the ideal view lies right here. We can see why this law of the "inheritance of acquired characteristics," in Professor James' language, "should not be verified in the human race, and why, therefore, in looking for evidence on the subject, we should confine ourselves exclusively to lower animals. In them fixed habit is the essential and characteristic law of nervous action. The brain grows to the exact modes in which it has been exercised, and the inheritance of these modes—then called instincts—would have in it nothing surprising. But in man the negation of all fixed modes is the essential characteristic. He owes his whole preëminence as a reasoner, his whole human quality of intellect, we may say, to the facility with which a given mode of thought in him may suddenly be broken up into elements, which re-combine anew. Only at the price of inheriting no settled instinctive tendencies is he able to settle every novel case by the fresh discovery by his reason of novel principles. He is, par excellence, the educable animal."[18]
To over-emphasize the principle of heredity, then, is to strike at one of the most fundamental distinctive human qualities, and so to endanger every ideal interest. The growing like-mindedness of men and their mutual influence are not forthwith to be ascribed to an omnipotent principle of heredity.
3. Not Due to a Mystical Solidarity.—Nor is the mutual influence of men to be explained by any mystical solidarity of the race considered as a finite whole. It is a simple and reasonable scientific demand, that we should not assume a mysterious, indefinable and incalculable cause, where known and intelligible causes suffice to explain the phenomena in question. Do we need, or can we intelligently use, a mystical solidarity? The only solidarity of the race which we seem really to need, or with which we seem able intelligently to deal, is the actual like-mindedness and the actual personal relations themselves—the reciprocal action of spirits—the only kind of reciprocal action which we can finally fully conceive. Any other finite solidarity than this, though it has often figured in theology, seems to me only a name without significance. In any case, we need to insist in theology, much more than we have, upon that unity of the race which is due to the actual likeness of men and their actual mutual personal influence. Such a unity we know and can understand, and it is of the highest ethical and spiritual importance. But to make much of the physical unity is to ground the spiritual in the physical; and, on the other hand, to take refuge in a mystical solidarity—and this is often felt to be a rather deep procedure—for whatever theological purpose, is to hide in the fog of the obscure and unintelligible.
4. Grounded in the Immanence of God.—But back of all finite phenomena, we may still ask for an ultimate explanation of the possibility of any reciprocal action even between spirits. And it is, perhaps, this ultimate explanation after which the idea of a mystical solidarity of the race is blindly groping. Unless one chooses to accept reciprocal action as a necessarily given fact in any universe (and this position, I think with F. C. S. Schiller, may be reasonably defended),[19] he must somewhere in his thinking ask for its final explanation. And most of those, who try to think things through, feel this pressure. And metaphysics, we do well to remember with Professor James, "means only an unusually obstinate attempt to think clearly and consistently."[20] As Lotze puts it: "How a cause begins to produce its immediate effect, how a condition is the foundation of its direct result, it will never be possible to say; yet that cause and effect do thus act must be reckoned among those simple facts that compose the reality which is the object of all our investigation. But there is an intolerable contradiction in the assumption that, though two beings may be wholly independent the one of the other, yet that which takes place in one can be a cause of change in the other; things that do not affect each other at all, cannot at the same time affect each other in such a manner that the one is guided by the other."[21]
This question is fairly thrust upon us by the facts of the social consciousness. How can it be that we do so influence one another? how is our reciprocal action metaphysically possible? The answer of theistic philosophy to this question is found in the being of God.
Upon the metaphysical side, theistic philosophy affirms that we can ascribe independent existence in the highest sense only to God. All else is absolutely dependent for its existence and maintenance upon him. The kind of reality that we demand for man is not that he be outside of God, independent of him; this would not make man more, but less. Every thorough-going theistic view must have this at least in common with pantheism, that it recognizes everywhere a real immanence of God. We are, because God wills in us. This metaphysical relation of the finite to the infinite, to be sure, is not to be conceived spatially or materially; nor, least of all, is it be so conceived as to deny a real self-consciousness and a real moral initiative to the finite spirit; but it does involve the absolute dependence of all the finite upon the will of God. As to our being, we root solely in God. And the unity and consistency of the being of God are the actual ground of our possible reciprocal action. Only so is that contradiction of which Lotze spoke avoided. We are not independent of one another, because we are all alike dependent for our very being upon God. And we are thus members one of another, ultimately, only through him.
The further fact, that we are never fully able to trace causal connections anywhere; that even in the clearest case no possible analysis of one stage in the process enables us to prophesy, independently of experience, the next stage, also compels us to admit that the full cause is not really present in any of the finite manifestations we can follow; that we have always to take account of the "hidden efficacy of the Infinite everywhere at work," and so must recognize once again the indubitable immanence of God, the absolute dependence of the finite upon his will, and our reciprocal action as possible only through him.[22]
Or, to put the same thing a little differently, any adequate theory of causality seems to lead us up inevitably to purpose in God. As Professor Bowne states it:[23] "The fundamental antithesis of purpose and causation is incorrect. The true antithesis is that of mechanical and volitional causality." And he intimates the probability that all causality, even in the physical world, is ultimately volitional. "It becomes a question," he says, "whether true causality can be found in the phenomenal at all, and not rather in a power beyond the phenomenal which incessantly posits and continues that order according to rule." The unity and consistency of the immanent will of God, then, are the ultimate metaphysical ground of all reciprocal action. The mutual influence, that is, even of spirits, finds its final full explanation only in God.
The social consciousness, therefore, so far as it is an expression of the possibility and inevitableness of our mutual influence, is a reflection of the immanence of the one God in the unity and consistency of his life.
But this, after all, is not the most important element of the social consciousness. So far as it is ethical at all, it can have no final explanation in the metaphysical, considered as mere matter of fact. We are driven, therefore, to ask the second question involved in the subject of the chapter.
II. WHAT IS REQUIRED FOR THE FINAL POSITIVE JUSTIFICATION
OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS AS ETHICAL?
1. Must be Grounded in the Supporting Will of God.—It is not enough that we should be able to think of the unity of One Life pervading all, or even of One Will upholding all. If the social consciousness, as distinctly ethical, is to have any final justification, it must be able to believe that it is in league with the eternal and universal forces; that the fundamental trend of the universe is its own trend; in other words, that the deepest thing in the universe is an ethical purpose conceivable only in a Person; that the ideals and purposes of finite beings expressed in the social consciousness are in line with God's own; that the loving holy purpose of the Infinite Will quickens and sustains and surrounds our purposes.
Let us distinctly face the fact that, unless the social consciousness can be so grounded in the very foundation of the universe, it must remain an illogical and unjustifiable fragment in the world, without real excuse for being. That is, if the social consciousness is not to be an illusion, it must be, as Professor Nash contends, cosmical, and not merely individual, and ethics must root in religion. This is the very heart of his stimulating book, Ethics and Revelation, expressed, for example, in such sentences as these: "Nothing save a sense of deep and intimate connection with the solid core of things, nothing save a settled and fervid conviction that the universe is on the side of the will in its struggle for that whole-hearted devotion for the welfare of the race, without which morality is an affair of shreds and patches, can give to the will the force and edge suitable to the difficult work it has to do. But this sense of kinship with what is deepest and most abiding in the universe—what else is meant by pure religion." And again: "We, as founders and builders of the true society, find ourselves shut up to an impassioned faith in the sincerity of the universe and the integrity of the fundamental being. Our religion is a deep and wide synthesis of feeling, whereby that personal will in us, which grounds society, comes into solemn league and covenant with the fundamental being. Here is the focus-point of the prophetic revelation. At this point, the deep in God answers to the deep in Man.... All that He is He puts in pledge for the perfecting of the society He has founded."[24]
Paulsen expresses only the same fundamental conviction, from the point of view of the philosopher, and, at the same time, the heart of his own solution of the relation between knowledge and faith, when he says: "There is one item, at least, in which every man goes beyond mere knowledge, beyond the registration of facts. That is his own life and his future. His life has a meaning for him, and he directs it toward something which does not yet exist, but which will exist by virtue of his will. Thus a faith springs up by the side of his knowledge. He believes in the realization of this, his life's aim, if he is at all in earnest about it. Since, however, his aim is not an isolated one, but is included in the historical life of a people, and finally in that of humanity, he believes also in the future of his people, in the victorious future of truth and righteousness and goodness in humanity. Whoever devotes his life to a cause believes in that cause, and this belief, be his creed what it may, has always something of the form of a religion. Hence faith infers that an inner connection exists between the real and the valuable within the domain of history, and believes that in history something like an immanent principle of reason or justice favors the right and the good, and leads it to victory over all resisting forces." And Paulsen holds that this implicit faith characterizes necessarily every philosophical theory. "What the philosopher himself accepts as the highest good and final goal he projects into the world as its good and goal, and then believes that subsequent reflections also reveal it to him in the world."[25]
We must be able, then, to believe that the best we know—our highest ideals—are at home in the world, or give up all faith in the honesty of the world, and all hope of philosophy, to say nothing of religion. Ultimately, now, this means that nothing short of full Christian conviction is needed to support the social consciousness. We need to be able to believe that the spirit of the life and death of Christ is at the very heart of the world. Nothing less will suffice. And this is exactly the support which the Christian revelation offers to the social consciousness.
2. God's Sharing in Our Life.—But if the social consciousness is only a true reflection of God's own desire and purpose, then in a sense far deeper than the merely metaphysical, our life is the very life of God. He shares in it. And no man can really see what that means, and not find a new light falling on all the world, and himself carried on to take up a new confession of faith in the solemn words of another: "For the agony of the world's struggle is the very life of God. Were he mere spectator, perhaps, he too would call life cruel. But in the unity of our lives with his, our joy is his joy, our pain is his." And from the vision of this self-giving life of God we turn back to our own place of service, saying with Matheson: "If Thou art love then Thy best gift must be sacrifice; in that light let me search Thy world."[26]
We probably cannot better express this unity of our highest ethical life with the life of God than by renewing our old faith that we are children of a common Father, who have come, under God's own leading—so far as a social consciousness is ours—voluntarily to share in God's loving purpose in the creation and redemption of men. We do not work alone; nay, we are co-workers with God.
3. The Consequent Transfiguration of the Social Consciousness.—And as soon as we have thus really and deeply come into the meaning of Christ's thought of God as Father, and into his revelation in his life and death as to what the spirit of that Fatherhood is, we turn back to the elements of our social consciousness to find them all transfigured.
Our likeness is the likeness of common children of God reflecting the image of the one Father, capable of character and of indefinite progress into the highest.
Our mutual influence roots in a real Fatherhood, both in source of being and in the one purpose of love, alike creating and redemptively working for all.
Our sense of the value and sacredness of the person now for the first time gets its full justification. Men are not only creatures capable of joying and suffering, but children of God with a preciousness to be interpreted only in the light of Christ, and with the "power of the endless life" upon them. Concerning the value of the person, it is worth stopping just here, to notice that it is peculiarly true of the social consciousness, that it is not free to ignore such considerations upon immortality as those which weighed most with John Stuart Mill and Sully. Of the hope of immortality, Mill says: "The beneficial influence of such a hope is far from trifling. It makes life and human nature a far greater thing to the feelings, and gives greater strength as well as greater solemnity to all the sentiments which are awakened in us by our fellow-creatures, and by mankind at large." And Sully adds: "I would only say that if men are to abandon all hope of a future life, the loss, in point of cheering and sustaining influence, will be a vast one, and one not to be made good, so far as I can see, by any new idea of services to collective humanity."[27]
Our sense of obligation deepens with all this deepening of the value of men, and our conscience becomes only a true response to God's own life and character—in no mere figurative sense the voice of God in us.
And our love becomes simply entering a little way into God's own love, a sharing more and more in his life.
And when one has once seen the social consciousness so transfigured in the light of Christ's revelation, he must believe that then, for the first time, he has seen the social consciousness at its highest, and that it is impossible for him to go back to the lower ideal. If the social consciousness is not an illusion, Christ's thought of God and of the life with God ought to be true; and if the world is an honest world, it is true. It is not only true that Christ has a social teaching, but that the social consciousness absolutely requires Christ's teaching for its own final justification. The Christian truth is so great that it alone can give the social consciousness its fullest meaning, alone can enable it to understand itself, and alone can give it adequate motive and power; for, in Keim's words, "to-day, to-morrow, and forever we can know nothing better than that God is our Father, and that the Father is the rest of our souls."[28]
[18] James, Psychology, Vol. II, pp. 367, 368.
[19] The Philosophical Review, May, 1896, p. 228.
[20] Psychology, Briefer Course, p. 461.
[21] Microcosmus, Vol. II, p. 599.
[22] See King, Reconstruction in Theology, pp. 54, 84, 102.
[23] Theory of Thought and Knowledge, pp. 91, 111.
[24] Ethics and Revelation, pp. 50, 243, 244.
[25] Introduction to Philosophy, pp. 8, 9, 313.
[26] Searchings in the Silence, p. 46.
[27] Quoted by Orr, The Christian View of God and the World, pp. 160, 72.
[28] Quoted by Bruce, The Kingdom of God, p. 157.
THE INFLUENCE OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS
UPON THE CONCEPTION OF RELIGION
INTRODUCTION
From the question of the support which Christian faith and doctrine give to the social consciousness, we turn now to the second part of our inquiry: How does this growing social consciousness, not by any means always consciously religious, naturally react upon and affect our conceptions of religion and of theological doctrines?
In this inquiry, we cannot always be sure historically of the exact connection, and, for our present purpose, this is not of prime importance. But we can see, for example, in this second division of our theme, the relations of religion and the social consciousness, and how religion must be conceived if the social consciousness is fully warranted; and this is the main question.
If the definition of theology which has been suggested be adopted—the thoughtful and unified expression of what religion means to us—then it is obvious that any change in conception or emphasis in religion will necessarily affect theological statement. Our inquiry as to the influence of the social consciousness, therefore, naturally begins with religion.
The discussions of this division, moreover, will really include all that part of theological doctrine which has to do with the growth into the life with God.
The natural influence of the social consciousness upon the conception of religion may be, perhaps, summed up in four points, which form the subjects of the four succeeding chapters: (1) The social consciousness tends to draw religion away from the falsely mystical; (2) it tends to emphasize the personal relation in religion, and so keeps the truly mystical; (3) it tends to emphasize the ethical in religion; (4) it tends to emphasize the concretely historically Christian in religion.
CHAPTER V
THE OPPOSITION OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS TO
THE FALSELY MYSTICAL
I. WHAT IS THE FALSELY MYSTICAL?
Two very clear answers made from different points of view deserve attention.
1. Nash's Definition.—In trying to set forth the "main mood and motives of religious speculation" in the early Christian centuries, Professor Nash takes, as perhaps the two strongest influences in determining the type of man to whom Christian apologetics had then to appeal, Philo and Plotinus, and says: "By what road shall the mind enter into a deep and intimate knowledge of God? That is the decisive question. Plotinus the Gentile and Philo the Jew are at one in their answer. The reason must rise above reasoning. It must pass into a state that is half a swoon and half an ecstasy before it can truly know God. Philo gave up for the sake of his theory, the position of the prophets. Plotinus, for the same theory, forsook the position of Plato and Aristotle. The prophets conceived the inmost essence of things, the being and will of God, as a creative and redemptive force that guided and revealed itself through the career of a great national community. Plato and Aristotle conceived the essence of life as a labor of reason; and, for them, the labors of reason found their sufficient refreshment and inspiration in those moments of clear synthesis which are the reward of patient analysis. Revelation came to the prophet through his experience of history. To the philosopher it came through hard and steady thinking. But Philo and Plotinus together declared these roads to be no thoroughfares. The Greek and the Jew met on the common ground of a mysticism that sacrificed the needs of sober reason and the needs of the nation to the necessities of the monk."[29] Mysticism is here conceived as unethical, unhistorical, and unrational.
2. Herrmann's Definition.—Herrmann's definition of mysticism is the second one to which attention is directed. He says: "When the influence of God upon the soul is sought and found solely in an inward experience of the individual; when certain excitements of the emotions are taken, with no further question, as evidence that the soul is possessed by God; when, at the same time, nothing external to the soul is consciously and clearly perceived and firmly grasped; when no thoughts that elevate the spiritual life are aroused by the positive contents of an idea that rules the soul—then that is the piety of mysticism. He who seeks in this wise that for the sake of which he is ready to abandon all beside, has stepped beyond the pale of Christian piety. He leaves Christ and Christ's Kingdom altogether behind him when he enters that sphere of experience which seems to him to be the highest."[30] The marks of mysticism for Herrmann, then, are: that it is purely subjective; that it is merely emotional and unethical; and hence that it has no clear object, and is abstract, unrational, unhistorical, and so unchristian.
II. THE OBJECTIONS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS
TO THE FALSELY MYSTICAL
Against this neo-platonic, falsely mystical conception of religion, the social consciousness seems to be clearly arrayed, and, so far as the social consciousness influences religion, it will certainly tend to draw it away from this falsely mystical idea.
1. Unethical.—For, in the first place, this neo-platonic conception of religion has nothing distinctly ethical in it. The ethical is manifestly not made the test of true religious experience, as it is in the New Testament. The social consciousness, on the other hand, is predominantly and emphatically ethical, and can have nothing to do with a religion in which ethics is either omitted or is wholly subordinate. At this point, therefore, the pressure of the social consciousness is strongly against a neo-platonic mysticism.
2. Does not Give a Real Personal God.—In the second place, the social consciousness cannot get along with the falsely mystical, because it does not give a real personal God. Let us be clear upon this point. Is not Herrmann right when he says that all that can be said of the God of this mysticism is "that he is not the world? Now that is precisely all that mysticism has ever been able to say of God as it conceives him. Plainly, the world and the conception of it are all that moves the soul while it thinks thus of God. Only disappointment can ensue to the soul whose yearning for God in such case keeps on insisting that God must be something utterly different from the world. If such a soul will reflect awhile on the nature of the God thus reached, the fact must inevitably come to the surface that its whole consciousness is occupied with the world now as it was before, for evidently it has grasped no positive ideas—nothing but negative ideas—about anything else. Mysticism frequently passes into pantheism for this very reason, even in men of the highest religious energy; they refuse to be satisfied with the mere longing after God, or to remain on the way to him, but determine to reach the goal itself, and rest with God himself."[31]
Now we have already seen that the social consciousness can find adequate support and power and motive only in faith that its purpose is God's purpose, that the deepest thing in the universe is an ethical purpose, conceivable only in a personal God; and, therefore, neither an empty negation nor pantheism can ever satisfy it.
3. Belittles the Personal in Man.—The false mysticism, moreover, belittles the personal in man as well as in God; for it does not treat with real reverence either the personality, the ethical freedom, the sense of obligation, or the reason of man. This whole thought of "a state that is half a swoon and half an ecstasy" is a sort of swamping of clear self-consciousness and definite moral initiative, in which the very reality of man's personality consists. It is a heathen, not a Christian, idea of inspiration which demands the suppression of the human, whether in consciousness, in will, in reason, or by belittling the sense of obligation to others. But mysticism has at least tended toward failure in all these respects.
And yet, from the time that Paul argued with the Corinthians against their immense overestimation of the gift of speaking with tongues, this fascination of the merely mystical has been felt in Christianity. (1) The very mystery and unintelligibility of the experience, (2) its ecstatic emotion, (3) its sense of being controlled by a power beyond one's self, and (4) its contrast with ordinary life—all these elements make the mystical experience seem to most all the more divine, although in so judging they are applying a pagan, not a Christian, standard. So far as these experiences have value, it is probably due to the strong and realistic sense which they give of being in the presence of an overpowering being. If thoroughly permeated and dominated with other elements, this sense is not without its value.
But it is interesting to notice that, although Paul does not deny the legitimacy of the gift of speaking with tongues, he nevertheless absolutely subordinates it, and insists that the most ecstatic religious emotions are completely worthless without love. Evidently the considerations which weighed most with the Corinthians in valuing the gift of unintelligible ecstatic utterance weighed little with Paul; and one can see how Paul implicitly argues against each of those considerations: (1) God is not an unknown, mystic force, but the definite, concrete God of character, shown in Christ. (2) He speaks to reason and will as well as to feeling, and he best speaks to feeling when he speaks to the whole man. True religious emotion must have a rational basis and must move to duty. (3) Religion, he would urge, is a self-controlled and voluntary surrender to a personal God of character, not a passive being swept away by an unknown emotion. (4) God has most to give, be assured, he would have added, in the common ways of life.
Now, in every one of these protests, the social consciousness instinctively joins. It cannot rest in a conception of religion that belittles the personal in God or man; for it is itself an emphatic insistence upon the fully personal. And it can, least of all, get on with the mystical ignoring of the rational and the ethical, for it holds that the social evolution moves steadily on to a rational like-mindedness, and to a definitely ethical civilization. Giddings puts the sociological conclusion in a sentence: "It is the rational, ethical consciousness that maintains social cohesion in a progressive democracy."[32] Now that which is clearly recognized as the goal in the relations of man to man will not be set aside as unwarranted or subordinate in the relations of man to God. And we may depend upon it.
4. Leaves the Historically, Concretely Christian.—Once more, the social consciousness cannot approve of the mystical conception of religion in its ignoring, in its highest state, the historically and concretely Christian. With mysticism's subjective, emotional, and abstract conception of the highest communion with God, and of the way thereto, the historical and concrete at best can be to it only subordinate means, more or less mysteriously connected with the attainment of the goal, and left behind when once the goal is reached.
The social consciousness, on the other hand, requires historical justification, and definitely builds on the facts of the historical social evolution.
In the case of the prophets and psalmists, for example, who alone in the ancient world most fully anticipated the modern social feeling, the social consciousness plainly arose in the face of the concrete historical life of a people. No result of modern Old Testament criticism is more certain. So that, speaking of "the religious aspects of the social struggle in Israel," McCurdy can use this strong language: "It is not too much to say that this conflict, intense, uninterrupted, and prolonged, is the very heart of the religion of the Old Testament, its most regenerative and propulsive movement. To the personal life of the soul, the only basis of a potential, world-moving religion, it gave energy and depth, assurance and hopefulness, repose and self-control, with an outlook clear and eternal."[33] But it was this standpoint of the prophets that the falsely mystical conception of religion abandoned. We may well take to heart, in our estimate of mysticism, the gradual but steady elimination of ecstasy in the development of Israel, and its practically total absence in those we count in the highest sense prophets.[34]
The social consciousness, moreover, has almost entirely to do with men, and hence naturally must lay stress on human history, rather than on nature, as a source of religious ideas. Indeed, it will have no doubt that what nature is made to mean religiously will be chiefly determined by the prevalent social ideals. It can, therefore, least of all ignore the historical in Christianity.
The social consciousness recognizes increasingly, too, with the clearing of its own ideals and with the deepening study of the teaching of Jesus, that it really is only demanding, in the concrete, and in detailed application to particular problems, and to all of them, the spirit shown in its fullness only in Christ, as Professor Peabody's eminently sane treatment of the social teaching of Jesus seems to me fairly to have proven. The social consciousness, therefore, cannot help becoming more and more consciously and emphatically Christian.
In a single sentence, because of the steps of its own long evolution, the social consciousness instinctively distrusts the highly emotional, unless it is manifestly under equally strong rational control, and unless it has equal ethical insight and power, and is historically justified. It tends, therefore, necessarily to draw away from the falsely mystical in religion, which is lacking in all these respects.
And the same reasons, which array the social consciousness against the falsely mystical in religion, lead it into natural sympathy with a positive emphasis upon the personal, the ethical, and the historically concretely Christian in religion.
[29] Nash, Ethics and Revelation, p. 33.
[30] Herrmann, The Communion of the Christian with God, pp. 19, 20.
[31] Herrmann, Op. cit., p. 27.
[32] Giddings, Elements of Sociology, p. 321; cf. also pp. 155 ff, 302, 320, 327.
[33] McCurdy, History, Prophecy, and the Monuments, Vol. II, p. 223; cf. pp. 214, ff.
[34] G. A. Smith, The Book of the Twelve Prophets, Vol. I, pp. 30, 84, 89; Cornill, The Prophets of Israel, pp. 41, 46; The Expository Times, Jan., Feb., 1902, article, Prophetic Ecstasy.
CHAPTER VI
THE EMPHASIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS UPON
THE PERSONAL RELATION IN RELIGION, AND
SO UPON THE TRULY MYSTICAL
I. THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS TENDS POSITIVELY TO EMPHASIZE
THE PERSONAL RELATION IN RELIGION
1. Emphasizes Everywhere the Personal.—The social consciousness sees man as preëminently the social animal, made for personal relations, irrevocably and essentially knit up with other persons. It deepens everywhere our sense of persons and of personal relations. It may be itself almost defined as the sense of the fully personal.
Religion, then, if it is to be most real to men of the social consciousness, must be personally conceived, that is, must be distinctly seen to be a personal relation of man to God. And this conception, as the highest we can reach, is to be followed fearlessly to the end; only guarding it against wrong inferences from the simple transference to God of finite conditions, and recognizing exactly in what respects the personal relation to God is unique.[35]
The social consciousness, moreover, as we have seen, must have a conception of religion that can really justify the social consciousness, and, therefore, must do justice to the fully personal in God and man; and this need also leads the social consciousness naturally to the conception of religion as a personal relation.
2. Requires the Laws of a Deepening Friendship in Religion.—When this conception is carried out, it is found that growth in the religious life, in communion with God, follows the laws of a deepening friendship.[36] These laws can, therefore, be known and studied and formulated; and religion, at the same time, ceases to be unintelligible and ceases to be isolated—cut off from the rest of life, and becomes rather that one great fundamental relation which gives being and meaning and value to all the rest. In absolute harmony, then, with the genesis of the social consciousness, religion, in this conception, is bound up with the whole of life; and we catch a glimpse of the real and final unity of life in true love, the relation to God and the relation to man each helping everywhere the other. If religion is truly a personal relation, and its laws are those of a deepening friendship, then every human relation, heartily and truly fulfilled, becomes a new outlook on God, a revelation of new possibilities in the religious life. And, on the other hand, in that mutual self-revelation and answering trust upon which every growing personal relation is built, every fresh revelation of God is an enlarging of our ideal for our relations to others. Even biblical literature, perhaps, furnishes no more perfect example of the interplay of the human and divine relations than Hosea's account of his own providential leading through the human relation into the divine, and back again from the divine to a still better human.
3. Requires the Ideal Conditions of the Richest Life in Religion.—And if religion is to be justified in its supreme claims by the social consciousness, it must be felt to offer, besides, the ideal conditions of the richest life. As a personal relation to God, religion need not shrink from this test. Our great needs are character and happiness. Psychology seems to me to point to two great means and to two accompanying conditions of both character and happiness. The means are association and work; the corresponding conditions are reverence for personality, and objectivity—the mood of both love and work. The great essentials, therefore, to the richest life are (1) association in which personality is respected, and (2) work in which one can lose himself. Now, when would these conditions become ideal? On the one hand, as to association, when the association is with him who is of the highest character and of the infinitely richest life, and relation to whom is fundamental to every other personal relation; when, secondly, God is made concrete and real to us in an adequate personal revelation of his character, and of his love toward us; and when, third, the association is individualized for each one, who throws himself open to God, in God's spiritual presence in us, constantly and intimately, and yet unobtrusively, coöperating with us. And, on the other hand, as to work, when the work is God-given work, to which one is set apart, and in which he may lose himself with joy. These are the ideal conditions of the richest life. Just these ideal conditions Jesus declared actualities. For the fulfilment of just these, in the case of his disciples, he prayed in his double petition,—"Keep them," "Sanctify them," "Keep them in thy name," that is, through the divine association. "Sanctify them"—set them apart unto their God-given work. "As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world." Such a conception of religion can fairly claim to meet, broadly and deeply, the most exacting demands of the social consciousness for emphasis upon the personal relation in religion.
II. THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS THUS KEEPS THE TRULY MYSTICAL
I have no predilection for the term mystical, and would gladly confine it to what I have termed the neo-platonic or falsely mystical, were it not that, in spite of the dictionaries and the histories of philosophy and the histories of doctrine, the term is used in two quite different senses. Many, it seems to me, are defending what they call the mystical in religion, who have no idea of defending what Herrmann and Nash call mystical. And many, on the other hand, are defending and teaching the falsely mystical through an undefined fear that else they will lose the truly mystical. Theology and religion both greatly need a clear discrimination of terms here. Many are involved, in both living and thinking, in a self-contradiction, which they feel but cannot state; and are urging with themselves and with others a means of religious life and a corresponding method of conception, which really contradict their highest convictions in other lines of life and thought. Can we find our way out of this confusion?
If one studies carefully the historical representatives of mysticism, and especially such a strong type as Jacob Böhme, whom Erdmann calls the "culmination of mysticism," and still keeps his head, certain dangers in mysticism, it would seem, must become apparent. And it may be worth while to attempt a brief, but definite, analysis of the justifiable and unjustifiable elements in these mystical movements.
1. The Justifiable and Unjustifiable Elements in Mysticism.—(1) The first danger in mysticism seems to me to be the tendency to make simple emotion the supreme test of the religious state. Whether this emotion is thought of as ecstatic—such as some of the old mystics called "being drunk with God," or, as quietistic—in which imperturbability, passionlessness, become the highest good—is comparatively indifferent. The justifiable element here is the insistence that religion is real and is life; for feeling is perhaps the most powerful element in the sense of reality. So James says: "Speaking generally, the more a conceived object excites us, the more reality it has."[37] The unjustifiable element is the perilous subjection of the rational and ethical. Such a view must always lack any positive and adequate conception of our active life and vocation in the world.
(2) A second closely connected danger in mysticism is the tendency toward mere subjectivism. There is here a justifiable element in the emphasis on one's own personal conviction and faith; an unjustifiable element in the tendency to underrate anything but the purely subjective, to ignore all correcting influences from others, from the church, and from the Scriptures.
(3) A third danger follows from this: the marked tendency to underestimate the historical. The justifiable element here is, again, the emphasis on personal conviction and faith; the unjustifiable element is the tendency toward the greatest one-sidedness, and toward emptiness, especially of ethical content. Advising our young people simply to "listen to God," without the strongest insistence upon the historical revelation of God at the same time, is exposing them to the great danger of mistaking for an indubitable, divine revelation the veriest vagary that may chance in their empty-mindedness next to come into their thought. With the reason in supposed abeyance, the door is thus thrown open to the grossest superstitions. Honest attempts to deepen the religious life may thus become dangerous assaults upon true religion.
(4) A fourth danger in mysticism is so strong a tendency toward vagueness, that the common mind is not without warrant in identifying mysticism and mistiness. The justifiable element here is in the real difficulty of expressing the full content of the entire religious experience; the unjustifiable element is, once more, the slighting of the historical, the ethical, and the rational, especially in talking much of the contradictions of reason, and of what is above reason. Mysticism naturally lacks positive content.
(5) Another danger—the tendency toward pantheism—comes in partly, as Herrmann has suggested, as a meeting of this lack of content, and partly as the logical outcome of such an insistence upon losing oneself in God as amounts to a being swept out of one's self—a loss of clear and rational self-consciousness, which is next interpreted speculatively as a real absorption in God, and is then made the goal. This is the familiar road of Indian and neo-platonic mysticism, and its phenomena are real enough, but probably of only the slightest religious significance. Tennyson tells somewhere of the immense sense of illumination that came to him once from simply repeating monotonously his own name—"Alfred Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson." This may be as effective as looking at the end of one's nose and ceaselessly reiterating "Om," as does the Hindu ascetic. A still shorter and more certain method is through nitrous-oxide-gas intoxication, of which Professor James says: "With me, as with every other person of whom I have heard, the key-note of the experience is the tremendously exciting sense of an intense metaphysical illumination. Truth lies open to the view in depth beneath depth of almost blinding evidence. The mind sees all the logical relations of being with an apparent subtlety and instantaneity, to which its normal consciousness offers no parallel; only as sobriety returns, the feeling of insight fades, and one is left staring vacantly at a few disjointed words and phrases as one stares at a cadaverous-looking snow-peak from which the sunset glow has just fled, or at the black cinder left by an extinguished brand." "The immense emotional sense of reconciliation," he felt to be the characteristic mood. "It is impossible to convey," he says, "an idea of the torrential character of the identification of opposites as it streams through the mind in this experience."[38]
Now it is not safe to ignore such facts, when we are seriously trying to estimate the religious significance of intense emotional experiences, the reality of which we need not at all question. The vital question is, not that of the reality of the experiences, but that of the real cause of the experiences; and the only possible test of this is rational and ethical. But from this test, mysticism tends from the start to shut itself off, and so, assuming the experience to be truly religious, ends often in virtual pantheism. The justifiable element in this insistence upon absorption in God is the necessary moral relation of complete surrender to God. The unjustifiable element is in belittling the personal in both God and man, and in making essentially religious an experience that has almost nothing of the rational and ethical in it, and that, on that very account, fosters the irreverent familiarity with Christ so deplored by more than one careful student of mysticism. A natural and common and most dangerous accompaniment of such an intense emotional experience is the tendency afterward, to excuse sin in oneself. In the case of the most conscientious, it is worth noting, such an emphasis upon intense experiences tends to lead them to distrust the reality of the normal Christian experience if they have not had these intense emotions, or if they have had them, tends to bring them into despair when they find these marked experiences actually proving less powerful in effects upon life than they had expected.
(6) The last danger in mysticism, to which reference will be made, is the tendency to extravagant symbolism. This is closely connected with "the immense emotional sense of reconciliation," and is much stronger by nature in some than in others. The born mystic finds his own subjective views symbolized everywhere, and is in grave danger of being led into an ingenious, practically unconscious intellectual dishonesty. The justifiable element here is that sense of the unity and worth of things which is the most fundamental conviction of our minds. The unjustifiable element has been sufficiently indicated.
The justifiable elements in mysticism, then, may be said to include: the insistence on the legitimate place of feeling in religion as a real and vital experience; the emphasis on one's own conviction and faith; the real difficulty of expressing the full meaning of the religious experience; the demand for a complete ethical surrender to God; and the faith in the real unity and worth of the world in God. Now if one tries to bring together these justifiable elements in mysticism, the truly mystical may all be summed up as simply a protest in favor of the whole man—the entire personality. It says that men can experience and live and feel and do much more than they can logically formulate, define, explain, or even fully express. Living is more than thinking.
2. The Protest in Favor of the Whole Man.—The element to which mysticism has tried most to do justice is feeling, and so it has been liable to a new and dangerous one-sidedness. But the truly mystical must be a protest alike against a narrow juiceless intellectualism, against a narrow moralistic rigorism, and against a blind and spineless sentimentalism. It is a protest particularly against making the mathematico-mechanical view of the world the only view; against making logical consistency the sole test of truth or reality; against ignoring all data, except those which come through the intellect alone; that is, against trying to make a part, not the whole, of man the standard; in other words, against ignoring the data which come through feeling and will—emotional, æsthetic, ethical, and religious data, as well as those judgments of worth which underlie reason's theoretical determinations.
Man stands, in fact, everywhere face to face with an actual world of great complexity, that seems to him at first what James says the baby's world is, "one big blooming buzzing confusion;" "and the universe of all of us is still to a great extent such a confusion, potentially resolvable, and demanding to be resolved, but not yet actually resolved, into parts."[39] In one sense, man's whole task is to think unity and order into this confusion. The problem really becomes that of thinking the universe through in several kinds of terms, and then finally bringing all together into one comprehensive view. All these are alike ideals which the mind sets before itself. The easiest of these problems is the attempt to think the world through, in mathematico-mechanical terms. But the attempt to think the world through in æsthetic or ethical or religious terms is equally legitimate, though it is more difficult. Not only, then, is the mathematico-mechanical view not the sole justifiable view, but it really has its justification in an ideal, and success in this attempt affords just encouragement for the hope of success in the other more difficult problems.[40]
The truly mystical holds, then, that the narrow intellectualism is unwarranted, because natural science, the mechanical view of the world, is itself an ideal—the "child of duties," as Münsterberg calls it—and so cannot legitimately rule out other ideals; because we have just as immediate a conviction concerning the worth, as concerning the logical consistency of the world; because a narrow intellectualism would make conscious life but a "barren rehearsal" of the outer world, without significance; because if we can trust the indications of our intellect, we ought to be able to trust the indications of the rest of our nature; and because, thus, the only possible key and standard of truth and reality are in ourselves—the whole self, and "necessities of thought" become necessities of a reason which means loyally to take account of all the data of the entire man.
And the same point may be thus stated. We use the word rational in two quite distinct senses: in the narrow sense, as meaning simply the intellectual; in the broad sense, as indicating the demands of the entire man. The true mysticism stands for the broadly rational.
So, too, we speak of the necessary fundamental assumption of the honesty or sincerity of the world; but this includes two quite distinct propositions: one, that the world must be thinkable, conceivable, construable, a logically consistent whole, a sphere for rational thinking,—where the test is consistency; the other, that the world must be worth while, must not mock our highest ideals and aspirations, must in some true and genuine sense satisfy the whole man, be a sphere for rational living,—where the test is worth. All our arguments go forward upon these two assumptions. Now, a true mysticism contends that the second principle is as rational as the first, though it must be freely granted that it is not as easy to employ it for detailed conclusions, and it is consequently much more liable to abuse. The true mysticism wishes to be not less, but more, rational. It knows no shorthand substitute for the hard and steady thinking of the philosopher, or for the historical experience of the prophet; it needs and uses both.
In all this, it is plain that the truly mystical is a legitimate outgrowth of the emphasis of the social consciousness upon recognition of the entire personality. Phillips Brooks finds just this in the intellectual life of Jesus. "The great fact concerning it is this," he says, "that in him the intellect never works alone. You never can separate its workings from the complete operation of the entire nature. He never simply knows, but always loves and resolves at the same time."[41]
3. The Self-Controlled Recognition of Emotion.—Moreover, it probably may be fairly claimed that all of the mystical recognition of the emotional which is valuable or even legitimate, is preserved, and far more safely and sanely conceived, in a strictly personal conception of religion. It may well be doubted, if it is possible in any other way, both to do justice to feeling in religion, and at the same time to keep feeling in its proper place. Is it possible briefly to indicate both the recognition of emotion and the control of emotion in religion?
The true mysticism recognizes that the supreme joy is "joy in personal life"—joy in entering into the revelation of a person; and it believes with reason that a growing acquaintance with God must have such heights and depths of meaning as no other personal relation can have. It is not, therefore, afraid or distrustful of true emotion—of joy or peace, of intense longing or of keen satisfaction—in the religious life.
But the true mysticism knows at the same time that deep revelation of a person is made only to the reverent, that the conditions are in the highest degree ethical, and above all must be recognized to be so in religion. It does view, then, with deep distrust an emotional emphasis in religion that ignores the ethical. It cannot forget that Christ thought that everything must be tested by its fruits in life. Paul, too, insisted on applying the test of an active ministering love to the highly valued emotional experiences of the Corinthians; and writes to the Galatians that there is but one infallible proof of the working of the Spirit in them—a righteous life: "love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance."
And a true mysticism knows that the spirit, reverent of personality, leads to a self-restraint that does not seek the emotional experience simply as such on any conditions; but, knowing the supreme psychological conditions of happiness and character and influence, it loses itself in an unselfish love and in absorbing work, and understands that it must simply let the experiences come. It will have nothing, therefore, to do with strained emotion, or with the working up of feeling for its own sake. It seeks health, not merely the signs of health. It prizes, therefore, the joy that simply proclaims itself as the sign of the normal life and so positively strengthens and cheers, but it will have nothing of the strain of emotion which is drain.
It is interesting to notice that it is exactly this true psychological attitude concerning the emotional life that Phillips Brooks believed that he found perfectly reflected in Jesus. "The sensitiveness of Jesus to pain and joy," he says, "never leads him for a moment to try to be sad or happy with direct endeavor; nor, is there any sign that he ever judges the real character of himself or any other man by the sadness or the happiness that for the moment covers his life. He simply lives, and joy and sorrow issue from his living, and cast their brightness and their gloominess back upon his life; but there is no sorrow and no joy that he ever sought for itself, and he always kept a self-knowledge underneath the joy or sorrow, undisturbed by the moment's happiness or unhappiness."[42]
How far from this objectivity and this healthful emotional life is the atmosphere of most of our devotional books, and, one might say, of all the manuals of ordinary mysticism! That this difficulty should confront us in devotional literature is very natural; for such writing commonly aims to give the emotional sense of reality in religion; and is, therefore, particularly under the temptation to show and to produce a straining after the emotion, as for its own sake. Moreover, the very introspection, almost inevitably involved in the reading and writing of devotional books, tends to bring about an artificial change in the religious experience, and so to introduce into it the abnormal.
But the social consciousness, so far as it affects religion, not only tends to draw away from the falsely mystical, and to emphasize the personal, and so to keep the truly mystical, but it is even more plain that it must tend to insist upon the ethical in religion.
[35] Cf. King, Reconstruction in Theology, p. 201 ff.
[36] Op. cit., pp. 210 ff.
[37] James, Psychology, Vol. II, p. 307.
[38] James, The Will to Believe, pp. 294, 295.
[39] Psychology, Briefer Course, p. 16.
[40] Cf. James, Psychology, Vol. II, 633-677; especially 633, 634, 667, 671, 677; Münsterberg, Psychology and Life, pp. 23-28.
[41] Brooks, The Influence of Jesus, p. 219.
[42] The Influence of Jesus, p. 156.
CHAPTER VII
THE THOROUGH ETHICIZING OF RELIGION
I. THE PRESSURE OF THE PROBLEM
The social consciousness looks to the thorough ethicizing of religion. If the social consciousness is to be regarded as historically justified, it must believe that this growing sense of brotherhood and consequent obligation is simply our response to the on-working of God's own plan, God's own will expressing itself in us. The purpose to recognize the will of God, thus necessarily involves the recognition of human relations, since, as soon as conscience is strongly stirred in any direction, religion can but feel, in this demand of conscience, the demand of God, and, therefore, must bring the convictions of the social consciousness into religion. Indeed, it may be well believed that Kaftan is right in his insistence that it is exactly through the practical, that is, in the realm of the ethical, that knowledge arises from faith.[43]
In any case, it is evident that the old problem of faith and works, of religion and ethics, of the first and second commandments, meets us here in a way not to be put aside. With an ethical demand so insistent as that of the social consciousness no religion can be at peace that is not with equal insistence ethical. We are bound, then, to show how communion with God, the supreme desire to find God, necessarily carries with it active love for men. We must show how we truly commune with God in such active service. The social consciousness, thus, positively thrusts upon every religious man, who believes in it, the problem of the thorough ethicizing of religion. Or, to put the matter in a slightly different way, if the sense of the value and the sacredness of the person is one of the two greatest moral convictions of our time, then religion must be clearly seen to hold this conviction, or lose its connection with what is most real and vital to us. This is the problem.
II. THE STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
All will probably agree that religion is communion with God. We have seen why the social consciousness cannot accept a falsely mystical view of that communion. For similar reasons, it must make absolutely subordinate all non-ethical and simply mysterious means which make no appeal to the conscience and to the reason—the falsely sacramental. Only the person is truly sacramental. Much else may be of value, but the touch of personal life is the only absolute essential in religion. We have seen, also, why the social consciousness tends to regard religion as a strictly personal relation.
Our problem thus becomes: How does the desire for personal relation with God, the desire for God himself, lead directly into the ethical life—into the full and practical recognition of the ethical demands of the social consciousness?
To guard against any possible misconception, it is, perhaps, well to say at the start that the desire for a personal relation with God has no purpose of returning by another route to the false position of mysticism, in the claim of special private revelations that are exclusively for it. It expects, rather, personal conviction of that great revelation that is common to all, and, moreover, it knows well that no personal relation is essentially sensuous, and it certainly looks for no sensuous relation to God.
It may be worth while, too, to reverse our question for a moment, and ask how morality necessarily involves religion. The true moral life is the fulfilment of all personal relations, and as such can least of all omit the greatest and most fundamental relation which gives being and meaning and value to all the rest—the relation to God. The fully moral life, therefore, must include religion. The unity of the two may be thus seen.
But the present inquiry looks at the matter from the other side, and seeks a careful and thoroughgoing answer to the question: Why is the Christian religion, as a personal relation to God, necessarily ethical?
III. THE ANSWER
1. Involved in Relation to Christ.—In the first place, then, it probably may be safely claimed that there is no test of the moral life of a man so certain as his attitude toward Christ. Setting aside, now, any special religious claims of Christ altogether, and recognizing him only as earth's highest character, the supreme artist in living, who knows the secret of the moral life more surely and more perfectly than any other, he becomes even so the surest touch-stone of character; and the iron filings will not be more certainly attracted to the magnet than will the men of highest character be attracted to Christ when he is really seen as he is. There is no test of character so certain as the test of one's personal relation to the best persons. The personal attitude toward Christ is the supreme test. In receiving him, in becoming his disciples in a completer sense than we own ourselves the disciples of any other, we make the supreme moral choice of our lives; and, if no more is true than has been already said, we so accept as a matter of fact the fullest historical revelation of God at the same time. The ethical and religious here fall absolutely together. And all the subsequent choices of our Christian life, if true to Christ, are necessarily moral.
2. The Divine Will Felt in the Ethical Command.—In the second place, the sense of the presence of God, of the divine will laid upon us, if we have the religious feeling at all, comes to us nowhere in our common life so certainly and so persistently as in a sense of obligation which we cannot shake off, a sense of facing a clear duty. To run away from this, we are made to feel, is plainly to run away from God. Is this not a simply true interpretation of the common consciousness? Here, then, the religious experience is in the very sphere of the ethical, and identical with it.
3. Involved in the Nature of God's Gifts.—Again, God's gifts in religion are of such a kind that they simply cannot be given to the unwilling soul; just to receive them, therefore, implies willingness to use them; and faith becomes inevitably both "a gift and an activity." However one names God's gifts in religion, so long as the relation is kept a spiritual one at all, receiving the gift requires a real ethical attitude in the recipient. A real forgiveness, for example, involves personal reconciliation, restored personal relations; and reconciliation is mutual. One cannot, then, be said in any true sense to accept forgiveness from God who is not himself in an attitude of reconciliation with God, of harmony of will with him. In the same way, peace with God, the gift of the Spirit, life, God's own life, cannot be really given to any man without an ethical response on his part in a definite attitude of will. Anything arbitrary here is, therefore, necessarily shut out. God's gifts in religion are of such a kind that they simply cannot be given to the unwilling soul. They are not things to be mechanically poured out on men. We have no need, consequently, to guard our religious statements in this respect. We cannot even receive from God the spiritual gifts of the religious relation without the active will. Here, too, religion is certainly ethical.
4. Communion with God, through Harmony with His Ethical Will.—Or, one may say, desire for real communion with God seeks God himself, not things, or some experience merely. But the very center of personality is the will; any genuine seeking of God himself, therefore, to commune with him, requires unity with his ethical will. The deepest religious motive is at the same time, thus, an impulse to character.
5. The Vision of God for the Pure in Heart.—Christ's own statement—"Blessed are the pure in heart; for they shall see God"—suggests another aspect of this essential unity of the religious and the ethical. The connection in the beatitude is no chance one. The highest and completest revelation of personality, human or divine, can be made only to the reverent. God reveals himself to the reverent soul, and most of all to the pure—to those souls that are reverent of personality throughout and under the severest pressure. Therefore, the pure in heart shall see God. "The secret of the Lord is with them that fear him."[44] The vision of God requires the spirit that is reverent of personality, and this spirit is the abiding source of the finest ethical living.
6. Sharing the Life of God.—But perhaps the clearest and most satisfactory putting of the relation is this. The very meaning of religion is sharing the life of God. As soon, now, as God is conceived as essentially holy and loving, a God of character, a living will and not a substance—and Christianity to be true to itself, must always so conceive him—so soon religion and morality are indissolubly united. God's life, according to Christ's teaching, is the life of constant and perfect self-giving. To share the life of God, therefore, to share his single purpose, is to come into the life of loving service. The two fall together from the point of view of the social consciousness. And we are "saved," we come into the real religious life, only in the proportion in which we have really learned to love. "Everyone that loveth is begotten of God, and knoweth God."[45] The old separation of religion and character is impossible from this point of view.
7. Christ, as Satisfying Our Highest Claims on Life.—But we may still profitably press the question: Is the Christian religion—the special faith in the revelation of God in Christ, the best way to righteousness? does it necessarily, most naturally, most spontaneously, and most joyfully carry righteousness of life with it? If this is to be true, Christian faith, in Herrmann's language, "must give men the power to submit with joy to the claims of duty."[46] It may be doubted whether any one has dealt with this question as satisfactorily as Herrmann himself, and a few sentences may well be quoted from his discussion. "We know that the ordinary instinctive way in which men seek the satisfaction of all the needs of life makes it impossible to submit honestly to the demands of duty, and we see, also, the falsity of the childish idea of the mystics that this instinct should be extirpated; it follows, then, that we can only seek moral deliverance in a true and perfect satisfaction of our craving for life.... Now just such a feeling of perfect inner contentment is possible to the Christian, and he has it just in proportion as he understands that God turns to him in Christ.... This is redemption, that Christ creates within us a living joy, whose brightness beams even from the eye of sorrow, and tells the world of a power it cannot comprehend. And the power that works redemption is the fact that in our world there is a Man whose appearance can at any moment be to us the mighty Word of God, snatching us out of our troubles and making us to feel that he desires to have us for his own, and so setting us free from the world and from our own instinctive nature."[47]
Christ, that is, has no desire to withdraw himself from the test of the largest life. He is able to satisfy the highest demands for life. He courts the trial. He claims to offer life, the largest life. "I came," he says, "that they may have life, and may have it abundantly."[48] His way of deliverance is not negative but positive, not limiting but fulfilling. He is able to give such largeness of life in himself, such inner satisfaction of the craving for life, as makes a lower life lose its power over us, the larger and higher life driving out the meaner and lower. This is positive victory, supplanting the lower with the higher; just as in literature, in music, in friendship, and in love, we expect the best to break down the taste for the lower.
8. The Vision of the Riches of the Life of Christ, Ethically Conditioned.—But the thought of Christ's satisfying our highest claim on life deserves to be carried further, if it is to be saved from vagueness and to have its full power with us. The highest value in the world is a personal life. So Christ has made us feel. It is finally the only value, for all other so-called values borrow their value from persons. The highest joy conceivable is entering into the riches of another's personal life through his willing self-revelation. Now it is no fine fancy that the supremely rich life of the world's history is Christ's. God can only be known, if we are not to fall back into the vagaries of mysticism, in his concrete manifestation; and God opens out in Christ, the New Testament believes, the inexhaustible wealth of his own personal life. It is God's highest gift, the gift of himself. "No one knoweth the Son save the Father; neither doth any know the Father, save the Son, and he to whom the Son willeth to reveal him."[49] "This is life eternal, that they should know thee, the only true God, and him whom thou didst send."[50] So it seemed to Paul: "Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, was this grace given, to preach unto the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ."[51] Do we not here catch a glimpse of what the depth of that satisfaction with the inner life of God in Christ may be?
"For He who hath the heart of God sufficed, Can satisfy all hearts,—yea, thine and mine."
Only the riches of a personal life can satisfy our claim on life, our desire for life; and, ultimately, we can be fully satisfied only with God's own life in the fullest revelation he can make of it to us men. Only this can be "the unspeakable gift." The thirst for God, for the living God, is a simply true expression of the human heart when it comes to real self-knowledge.
But the riches of the personal life of Christ are necessarily hidden to one who does not come into the sharing of Christ's purpose. The condition of the vision is ethical. The very satisfaction, therefore, of our craving for life constantly impels to a more perfect union with the will of Christ; for such complete entering into the life of another with joy implies profound agreement. The desire for life, therefore, for God's own life, for communion with God, itself impels to character. Faith does here give "the power to submit with joy to the claims of duty," and religion is ethical in the very heart of it.
9. The Moral Law, as a Revelation of the Love of God.—The same unity of the religious and ethical life is helpfully seen, if we put the matter in one further and slightly different way. Only the Christian religion, faith in God as Father revealed in Christ, enables us to welcome the stern demands of duty and so gives us inner deliverance, joy, and liberty in the moral life; for now the moral demand is seen, not as task only, but as opportunity. For Christ, the law of God is a revelation of the love of God; it is a gracious indication—a secret whispered to us—of the lines along which we are to find our largest and richest life; it is not a limitation of life, but a way to larger life. Not, then, the avoidance, as far as possible, of the law of God, but the completest fulfilment of it is the road to life—following the hint of the law into the remotest ramifications, and into the inmost spirit, of the life. The other attitude which assumes that the law is a hindrance to life is a distinct denial of the love of God. It implies that God lays upon us demands which are not for our good. It refuses to accept as reality Christ's manifestation of God as Father. Real belief in the love of God, on the other hand, must take the fearful out of his commands. To be "freed from the law," now, has quite a different meaning: not the taking off from us of the moral demand, but the inner deliverance, that would not have the command removed, but finds life in it, and obeys it freely and joyfully. Only a thoroughgoing and fundamental faith in the Fatherhood of God can bring such inner deliverance, even as we have seen that only such a faith can really ground the social consciousness. And such a faith only Christ has proved adequate to bring.
With this light, now, we feel, in every demand of duty, the presence of God, and in this presence of God the pledge of life, not a limitation of life. The religious life desires God, and it finds God never so certainly as in the purpose fully to face duty. Every one of the relations of life is, thus, turned to with joy by the religious man, as sure to be a further channel of the revelation of God. The thirst for God drives to the faithful fulfilment of the human relation. Religion becomes joyfully ethical.
Nor is there any possibility of abandonment to the will of God in general, as the mystic seems often to feel. God's will means particulars all along the way of our life; and there is no communion with God except in this ethical will in particulars. At no point, therefore, can the religious life withdraw itself from the daily duty and maintain its own existence. The constant inevitable condition of the religious communion is the ethical will. Our providential place is God's place to find us. Where God has put us, just there he will best find us. This is further seen in the fact that the true Christian experience is a constant paradox: God ever satisfying, and yet ever impelling—never allowing us to remain where we are, but holding up to us the always higher ideal beyond; the law is ever, "Of his fulness we all received, and grace in place of grace."[52] The deepening communion with God is only through a constantly deepening moral life.
Such a thoroughgoing ethicizing of religion as the social consciousness demands, we need not hesitate, therefore, to believe is possible. The truer religion is to its own great aspiration after God, the more certainly is it ethical.
But the social consciousness, so far as it influences religion, not only tends to draw away from the falsely mystical, and to emphasize the personal and the ethical, it also tends to emphasize in religion the concretely, historically Christian.
[43] Cf. American Journal of Theology, Oct., 1898, p. 824.
[44] Psalm 25:14.
[45] I John 4:7.
[46] The Communion of the Christian with God, p. 230.
[47] Op. cit., pp. 232-234.
[48] John 10:10.
[49] Matt. 11:27.
[50] John 17:3.
[51] Eph. 3:8.
[52] John 1:16. Cf. Herrmann, Op. cit., pp. 92, 93.
CHAPTER VIII
THE EMPHASIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS UPON
THE HISTORICALLY CHRISTIAN IN RELIGION
The fact that the social consciousness tends to emphasize in religion the concretely historically Christian, has been so inevitably involved in the preceding discussions, that it can be treated very briefly.
I. THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS NEEDS HISTORICAL JUSTIFICATION
The justification of the social consciousness, we have seen,[53] must be preëminently from history. Neither nature nor speculation can satisfy it. It needs to be able to believe in a living God who is in living relation to living men. It needs just such a justification as historical Christianity, and only historical Christianity, can give; it needs the assurance of an objective divine will in the world, definitely working in the line of its own ideals. It needs also to be able to give such definite content to the thought of God as shall be able to satisfy its own strong insistence upon the rational and the ethical as historical.
II. CHRISTIANITY'S RESPONSE TO THIS NEED
If religion is to be a reality to the social consciousness, then, there must be a real revelation of a real God in the real world, in actual human history, not an imaginary God, nor a dream God, nor a God of mystic contemplation. This discernment of God in the real world, in actual history, is the glory even of the Old Testament; and it came, as we have seen, along the line of the social consciousness. And it is such a real revelation of the real God that Christianity finds preëminently in Christ. It can say to the social consciousness: Make no effort to believe, but simply put yourself in the presence of a concrete, definite, actual, historical fact, with its perennial ethical appeal; put yourself in the presence of Christ—the greatest and realest of the facts of history,—and let that fact make its own legitimate impression, work its own natural work; that fact alone, of all the facts of history, gives you full and ample warrant for your own being.
If this be true, it can hardly be doubted that, so far as the social consciousness understands itself and influences religion at all, it will tend to emphasize, not to underestimate, the concretely, historically Christian.
The natural influence of the social consciousness upon religion, then, may be said to be fourfold: it tends to draw away from the falsely mystical; it tends to emphasize the personal in religion, and so to keep the truly mystical; it tends to emphasize the ethical in religion; and it needs the concretely, historically Christian.
[53] Cf above, pp. 59 ff.
THE INFLUENCE OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS
UPON THEOLOGICAL DOCTRINE
CHAPTER IX
GENERAL RESULTS
The question of this third division of our inquiry is this: To what changed points of view, and to what restatements of doctrine, and so to what better appreciation of Christian truth, does the social consciousness of our time lead? The question is raised here, as in the case of the conception of religion, not as one of exact historical connection, but rather as a question of sympathetic points of contact. It means simply: With what changes in theological statements would the social consciousness naturally find itself most sympathetic?
Certain general results are clear from the start, and might be anticipated from any one of several points of view.
I. THE CONCEPTION OF THEOLOGY IN PERSONAL TERMS
In the first place, the social consciousness means, we have found, emphasis on the fully personal—a fresh awakening to the significance of the person and of personal relations. Its whole activity is in the sphere of personal relations. Hence, as in the conception of religion, so here, so far as the social consciousness affects theology at all, it will tend everywhere to bring the personal into prominence, and it certainly will be found in harmony ultimately with the attempt to conceive theology in terms of personal relations. These are for the social consciousness the realest of realities; and if theology is to be real to the social consciousness, then it must make much of the personal. Theology, thus, it is worth while seeing, is not to be personal and social, but it will be social—it will do justice to the social consciousness—if it does justice to the fully personal; for, in the language of another, "man is social, just in so far as he is personal."[54]
The foreign and unreal seeming of many of the old forms of statement, it may well be noted in passing, has its probable cause just here. They were not shaped in the atmosphere of the social consciousness. They got at things in a way we should not now think of using. The method of approach was too merely metaphysical and individualistic and mystical, and the result seems to us to have but slight ethical or religious significance. The arguments that now move us most, in this entire realm of spiritual inquiry, are moral and social rather than metaphysical and mystical. It is interesting to see, for example, how such arguments for immortality as that of the simplicity of the soul's being—and most of those used by Plato—and how such arguments even for the existence of God as those of Samuel Clarke from time and space, have become for us merely matters of curious inquiry. We can hardly imagine men having given them real weight. A similar change seems to be creeping over the laborious attempts metaphysically to conceive the divinity of Christ. The question is shifting its position for both radical and conservative to a new ground—from the metaphysical and mystical to the moral and social; though some radicals who regard themselves as in the van of progress have not yet found it out, and so find fault with one for not continually defining himself in terms of the older metaphysical formulas and shibboleths. The considerations, in all these questions and in many others, which really weigh most with us now, are considerations which belong to the sphere of the personal spiritual life. Ultimately, no doubt, a metaphysics is involved here too; but it is a metaphysics whose final reality is spirit, not an unknown substance—Locke's "something, I know not what."
The unsatisfactoriness of even so honored a symbol as the Apostles' Creed, as a permanently adequate statement of Christian faith, must for similar reasons become increasingly clear in the atmosphere of the social consciousness. One wonders, as he goes carefully over it, that so many concrete statements could be made concerning the Christian religion, which yet are so little ethical. The creed seems almost to exclude the ethical. It has nothing to say, except by rather distant implication, of the character of God, of the character of Christ, or of the character of men. The life of Christ between his birth and his death are untouched. The considerations that really weigh most with us—as they did with the apostles—in making us Christians, certainly do not come here to prominent expression. This whole difference of atmosphere is the striking fact; and were it not that we instinctively interpret its phrases in accordance with our modern consciousness, we should feel the difference much more than we do.
What the previous discussion has called the truly mystical—the recognition of the whole man, of the entire personality—is coming in increasingly to correct both the falsely mystical and the falsely metaphysical. We are arguing now, in harmony with the social consciousness, from the standpoint of the broadly rational, not from that of the narrowly intellectual.