Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

Theological Changes of View in England

TH

By the Rev. F. W. Farrar, D.D., F.R.S.

Dean of Canterbury, England.

HERE can be no question that great changes have come over the views of thinking men in England with regard to theological questions during this century. There is nothing to regret in the fact that advancing knowledge alters the complexion and shifts the perspective of long-current beliefs. It is inevitable that it should be so; for we know that

through the ages one increasing

purpose runs, And the thoughts of men are widened by the process of the suns.

Nor is it only inevitable, it is also most desirable, that the general advance in knowledge and in insight should shed fresh light, not, indeed, on the eternal and essential elements of religion, which have remained the same in all ages, but on the point of view under which we regard and the manner in which we formulate and explain the statements of theology. The light of all real knowledge is light from Heaven, and it cannot lead any faithful soul astray. Nothing can be more fatal, even to moral growth and spiritual progress, than a stereotyped immobility that blind and narrow stagnation in the infallibility of opinionated ignorance, which delivers brawling judg ments all day long on all things, unashamed, and which has always been as characteristic of imperfect and narrow religionists as it was of the "priests and Pharisees and hypocrites" in the days of our Lord. The example of those days, even if they stood alone, would be sufficient to show us that men, in the name of religion and even while they claim to be the sole faithful supporters of true religion are capable of committing, in the name of the religion which they profess, the deadliest of crimes. If any other instances were wanting, we may see them in the deadly guilt of Inquisitors, who, in the name of the Lord of Love, blackened the blue of heaven with the Tophet-smoke of their bale-fires of hell, by burning many a dear saint of God who held the truth which, to their own perdi

[ocr errors]

tion, they rejected, and who lived lives transcendently holier and purer than their own. In a milder form we may see the same pernicious results of incompetent religious arrogance in the fact that some of the best, wisest, most earnest and most brilliantly gifted divines of our own day—men such as Professor Maurice, and Charles Kingsley, and F. W. Robertson, and Dean Stanley, and others were all through their lives the favorite victims of the venomous attacks with which the so-called religious" press of party church newspapers is rife. Like Wesley and Whitefield, like Luther and Melancthon, like Savonarola and many more, these men— owing to the refusal of "priests" to accept the new truths-which shake their usurped authority, and expose the ignorant baselessness of their "infallible" judgments-have stood up, "The very butt of slander, and the blot of every dart that malice ever shot." An unprogressive religion is a decadent and dying religion; a religion which refuses new light is a dead religion. Such forms of belief will inevitably sink into abject and priestridden superstitions, or into the cumbersome paraphernalia of externalism, which thinks that God cares for the murmuring of rites and ceremonies, whereas he has again and again taught us that he requires our hearts, and that without heart-sincerity all else is but as the small dust of the balance.

Let me point out one or two respects in which the thoughts of men respecting the truths of religion have been enlarged and changed.

1. It is so as regards our conceptions of God.

One of the most competent of living men of science—Mr. Alfred Wallace-in his very interesting book "The Wonderful Century," estimates that this century has made greater advances in science, both theoretical and applied, than all the centuries of the past put together. Now, science has revealed to us immeasurably more of the laws of nature and of the

infinitude of the universe than was ever remotely dreamed of in past ages. The nature of the relation of God to man cannot be quite the same as it was when men regarded the earth as the center of the whole universe, and thought that the sun and the moon and the starry heavens existed only to give it light. A Greek philosopher defined the stars as "golden nails fixed in a crystalline sky." We now know something of the immeasurable, inconceivable vastness of God's universe, and we know that the earth is but as a speck in the intense inane, a mote of dust in the streaming of infinite light. We can no longer rest in schemes and systems which professed to speak of God" as though he were a man in the next room;" or which proceeded on the conviction that "man's nothing-perfect" could comprehend "God's all-complete." We have learnt

more

modesty and humility, more awful reverence for Him "whose ways are past finding out." We are no longer content to employ our days in the elaboration of "schemes" and "systems" and "philosophies" of the plan of salvation, and in thus dropping buckets into empty wells, and growing old in drawing nothing out. We are content with holier modesty; to lay our hands upon our lips and to say:

So runs my dream: but what am I? An infant crying in the night, An infant crying for the light, And with no language but a cry. Changed modes of expression, changed points of view, which-though they do not affect any radical and essential view of religion-seem to require changed methods of expression, may partly account for the deep and growing dislike to the use of the so-called "Athanasian" Creed in our public services. The Church of England is the only Church in all Christendom which recites this creed in common worship. The American Church has wisely discarded the practice, so also has the Irish Church. The dislike to it does not in the least spring from any lack of orthodoxy respecting the doctrine of the Trinity, but from the scholastic form of the creed, with its repetition of technical words-like "incomprehensible," "substance," "person" of which not one person in a hundred knows the true and technical meaning. It also rises from the damnatory clauses, which no honest or

[ocr errors]

enlightened man can repeat without the subauditur of large exceptions and explanations, and which the multitude usually understand in a false sense, and in that sense rightly repudiate as unscriptural and false. The narrow and anathematizing pseudo-orthodoxy which vehemently insists on the retention of this creed in public worship is extremely harmful to the Church of England, and alienates multitudes from her worship. Late, very ill constructed, harsh, and superfluously verbose, the creed is not in the slightest degree necessary, since the whole Catholic faith is amply and far better stated in the "Nicene" and the "Apostles' Creeds. It was once my curious fortune to stand in church facing a seat on which were seven or eight men of universal fame in art, in literature, in science, in public life. The expression of weariness and dislike upon the face of every one of them while the creed was being repeated was a lesson to me; for each one of them was not in any sense a skeptic, but a Christian and a communicant. All of them felt how utterly unlike was the form assumed by this creed to the general teaching and method of Holy Scripture. Not one of them doubted, so far as I knew, the doctrine of the Trinity; but they all felt that the harsh, formal, and technical dogmatism of the creed added nothing to true faith; while since so few are capable of grasping its real significance-it tends to minister directly to popular error. It is, however, doubtful whether at this moment there is enough of progressive open-mindedness in the English Church to follow, in this particular, the wiser example of all the other Churches of Christendom in not demanding the constant public recital of this late and technical creed.

2. Another subject on which there have been great changes of view is the Atonement. I believe that not only in the upper classes, but in all classes, men believe as firmly as ever they did in the Lord Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the world, by whose blood-that is, by whose essential life divinely imparted to us-we are cleansed and saved. But they do not believe and they rightly do not believein the hideous travesties of the doctrine which have been intruded upon mankind by an ignorant and systematizing theology,

based on the distortion and the misinterpretation of isolated metaphors, or the extravagant forcing of emotional language to impossible logical conclusions. They repudiate, and rightly repudiate, the blasphemy of representing God the Father as all-wrathful and inexorable justice, and God the Son as all-loving mercy. They accept no violent disintegration of the persons of the blessed Trinity in the work of man's salvation. They toss aside the age-long absurdity which represented God as paying to the Devil (!) the ransom of Christ's death. They no less reject the forensic theory by which St. Anselm replaced the old error a theory which dwelt on the "exact equivalent" of "vicarious substitutions," and which foisted into Scripture a mass of colossal or self-contradictory inferences, elaborated into a "philosophy of the plan of salvation," which relied exclusively on passing illustrations, and resembled a pyramid built upon its apex. Men have become impatient-and rightly impatient-of "the ever-widening spiral ergo drawn from the narrow aperture of single texts." They are more than content to know and be sure that "God is Love," and that "God in Christ"-not, as it is erroneously translated in our Authorized Version, "God for Christ's sake forgives us our sins, when, by the aid of his Holy Spirit, they are repented of. The clearing away from the doctrine of the Atonement of the gross anthropomorphism introduced into it by the language of self-satisfied theologians, ignorant preachers, and impassioned hymns, so far from tending to unbelief, has left men more humbly and deeply convinced that God, by his infinite love and mercy, has granted us pardon in Christ, a newness of life, even though we cannot understand his mysteries and cannot measure the arm of God by the finger of man.

3. Again, there has been a decided change in the thoughts of Christians about Eschatology. They now see that nothing. in Scripture necessitates the crude and glaring horrors, the ghastly and revolting misrepresentations of one or two Scripture metaphors, which have been consolidated into the doctrine of " Hell-fire." I have in my possession a revolting little picture which used to be given by Romish priests to children and women, representing a human being standing naked in red

6.

flames, of which the black smoke is smeared with hideous blood-gouts, while loathly serpents are twining round and round him, burying their fangs in his convulsive face, and their forked tails into the flesh of his arms; while underneath is written in old French, Pour n'y avoir pont pancé." Strange that Christians could really believe on the strength of a grossly misrepresented metaphor which there is no more excuse for taking literally than there would be for taking literally the metaphor of "Abraham's bosom "-that a God of Love could be happy while the creatures of his hands were writhing hopelessly and forever in unutterable material torments! Yet that they could maintain such conceptions is sufficiently proved by Dante's "Inferno," as much as by endless hymns and religious manuals. There has been a decided and a blessed change of view as to these cruel imaginings. When my 66 Eternal Hope" was published, I lived for weeks and months amid a hail-storm of anatheNow the majority of thinking and educated Christians hold the view which I there maintained-that sin indeed is always punishment, but that there is no proof that repentance and pardon will not be always possible, and that we may trust in the mercy of God "for ever and ever "or, as it is, literally, in the original, "for ever and beyond." We have learned-or, at any rate, all thinking and educated men have learned-that "everlasting" (atdios), which occurs but twice in the New Testament, is not a synonym of "eternal" (alóvios), but the direct antithesis of it; the former being the unrealizable conception of endless time, and the latter referring to a state from which our imperfect human conception of time is absolutely excluded.

4. Once more, there has been a radical and most imperatively called for change in the old superstition of what is called. "verbal inspiration." We know that God speaks to us out of his holy book; we know that it contains his revelation of himself; we know that it is, as a whole, the most supreme of collected literatures; we know that all the rest of the literatures of the world put together could not supply its place; but we know also that it is a plain, positive duty to consider it in the Heaven-sent light of advancing knowledge:

we know that all its incidental utterances are not final or infallible; we know that some of its books are composite in structure, and that some were written in times much later than the authors whose names they bear; we know that the Old Testament-as in the books of Daniel and Jonah, and in the sublime story of the Fall-admits (as our Lord's parables also consecrated) the use of Haggadah, or "moral allegory;" we know that the divine enlightenment, which we call "inspiration," did not exclude the human element in the imperfect medium by which it was communicated, and that in unimportant and minor matters it left the possibility of error; we know, above all, that Scripture is the true sense of scripture, as St. Augustine says; that Scripture is, and only is, what scripture means; that it must be interpreted as a whole; and that the totality of its teaching must not be perverted by insistence on the interpretation which we,

for party and for other purposes, may choose to distort out of its isolated and incidental phrases. Our reverence for Holy Scripture has not beeh diminished, but has been indefinitely increased, by the study and the criticism and the progressive enlightenment which have led us to a truer estimate of its place and meaning in the dealings of God with men.

On the whole, then, I am hopeful as to the stability of our Christian convictions in the minds of men of all classes. The leaders of intellectual research may not be "orthodox" in the old, narrow, arrogant, stereotyped sense of the word, which imposed a yoke of bondage on the free necks of Christians, who are all God's priests; but they believe in God, the Father, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord; and in that Holy Spirit which he made to dwell in us, and who yearneth jealously and tenderly over all whom God hath redeemed.

[blocks in formation]
[graphic][merged small][merged small]
« AnteriorContinuar »