Christian Unity

I

THE new sense of social service in all the churches, and the movement for union among the churches, are closely related. So long as the chief business of ecclesiastical organizations was to teach dogma, isolation was inevitable and desirable. The right of those who do not care to believe a particular creed to choose another creed must be recognized. When, however, religious societies accept the obligation of social service, combination is necessary for efficiency.

When the motive of the foreign missionary was to persuade the heathen to believe a special creed, each missionary tried to keep himself and his converts as far away as possible from every ot her missionary. But when the object of the foreign missionary is to build schools and hospitals and to bring to the heathen the benefits of Christian civilization, the necessity of coöperation is forced upon him.

This practical desire to get helpful things done is the popular reason for the increasing interest in Christian Unity. But there is here a very real danger. Intense interest in Social Science at home and abroad may make us forget that the churches are primarily religious institutions, not organized charity societies. It is true that the names of those who love their fellow men will head the list of those who love the Lord, but there are other legitimate ways of expressing love for God and receiving his help, which must not be overlooked. There may be scores of societies designed to teach men to do justly and to love mercy, but the Church is the sole means of teaching men to walk humbly with God.

The danger, to-day, is that those who are planning for Christian Unity, in their zeal to supply man’s physical needs, will forget that he also has spiritual needs. We must thank the social experts for their protest against selfish sectarianism and impractical otherworldliness, but if they are intelligent they will let the psychologists tell them that man cannot live by bread alone, even though every child be given plenty of it, because the human soul is athirst for the Living God. The help of the social expert must be the help of a friendly outsider. He may tell (he churches as forcefully as he will that sensible humanitarians consider their divisions inexcusable and shameful, but he is powerless to tell them how to unite. The movement for Christian Unity is not a humanitarian, but a religious, movement.

At this point the theologian offers himself as a guide. We owe him a debt of gratitude which we earnestly acknowledge. He has shown men that God’s revelation of Himself in Jesus Christ ‘is the fullest disclosure of the nature of God,’¹ and ‘that its interpretation of God in terms of divine fatherhood, and man in the terms of sonship, and the final end of life as a kingdom in which all men realize their nature, is alone adequate.’

The importance of this service few will dispute, but writers of creeds are rarely able to see clearly when their task is done, and the attempts of the theologians to substitute for the religion of Jesus their various theological speculations have caused more disunion than peace. We can, therefore, no more let the theologian lead us than the humanitarian. The movement for Christian Unity is not a philosophical or a metaphysical, but a religious movement.

Offers of guidance from the theologians are numerous. The followers of Alexander Campbell, who spent his life trying to unify Christendom, ask this question as of fundamental importance: ‘Do you believe that the Protestant Bible is an all-sufficient statement of Doctrine, of Worship, and of Service?’ The question is not an invitation to peace, but a challenge to fight.

The peace proposals of the Protestant Episcopal Church are also suggestive of the dogma which makes for disagreement. The committee it has recently appointed to advance the cause of Christian Unity is named, ‘A Commission on Faith and Order,’ and it asks us to pray that the day may be hastened, ‘when all men shall be enabled to see that Christians endeavor to keep the Unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace’; that among men ‘there is one body and one spirit, — one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one Cod and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.’

It would hardly be possible to put more theology into the same number of words, and it is the object of this paper to prove that if we are ever to have Christian Unity it will be because this prayer is not used.

The following statement by Andrew D. White in the preface to his History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom expresses probably the feeling of the most thoughtful men today: ‘My conviction is that science, though it has evidently conquered Dogmatic Theology based on biblical texts and ancient modes of thought, will go hand-in-hand with religion; and that although theological control will continue to diminish, religion as seen in the recognition of a “ power in the universe, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness,” and in the love of God and of our neighbor, will steadily grow stronger and stronger, not only in the American institutions of learning, but in the world at large.’

This contention, that the fundamental, permanent element in our ecclesiastical organizations is not theology but religion, is no new discovery. Lord Bacon in Essay 3, ‘Of Unity in Religion,’ said the same thing. ‘Religion being the chief band of human society, it is a happy thing when itself is well contained within the true band of unity. The quarrels and divisions about religions were evils unknown to the heathen. The reason was, because the religion of the heathen consisted rather in rites and ceremonies, than in any constant belief.’

Surely a candid study of the history of the Christian Church shows clearly that religion—not theology — is the important basic matter. The Nicene or the Augustinian or the Mediæval theologies, each and all, no more exhaust the full meaning of man’s relation to God than the Ptolemaic, the Newtonian, or the Darwinian theories of the physical universe exhaust the full meaning of man’s relation to nature. Because man has a mind he cannot but attempt to formulate his discoveries about God and about nature into systems of theology and of science, but those systems lose their value when they are considered final and not tentative. They are ways of approach, and not ends of journeys.

For one ecclesiastical institution to suppose that its creedal statement expresses the final truth about God and immortality is as absurd as to suppose that Newton’s Principia or Darwin’s Origin of Species gives final and complete knowledge of sky and earth. To assert that the sacramental means of grace performed by one accredited order of priests is the only way of appropriating divine strength is as untrue as it would be to claim that one type of engine utilizes the whole power of steam.

The real value of any movement for Christian Unity depends on the progress it makes toward securing for all an adequate expression of their religious life. The sole test, of the worth of theological formularies is their helpfulness toward that end. If that end is conserved, then the dogmatic statement is useful; if not, it is useless. The end in view is an adequate supply of spiritual and moral strength, not a final, unchangeable statement of theological truth. It is not denied that such a statement of truth would make men free from moral weakness and spiritual deadness. What is insisted on is that we can only arrive at the doctrine by doing the work, and that, therefore, in planning for Christian Unity, ethical and religious values are of the first importance; theological definition can be left to look after itself. Right conduct and humble worship are the only ways of becoming acquainted with God, and until men become acquainted with God they cannot write creeds which state exactly what his nature is.

What is desperately needed to-day is not a creed so exact that it contains all the truths that have ever been discovered about God, but a society in which every child of man can find moral strength and spiritual joy. The problem is psychological, not theological. If the problem were theological it would he hopeless, but because it is psychological it is solvable. We can learn about human nature if we try; and when we know human nature we can so order it that God can find his way in; but by searching, we cannot find out God.

II

Although man has been unconscious of it, the varieties of human nature have always influenced the organization of religion. The Methodist revival in England is an illustration of the successful demand of a kind of temperament for religious satisfaction which the old organization was not supplying, — though that demand could not define itself in exact terms. It is true that followers of Wesley developed a doctrine of the Holy Spirit unfamiliar to the Church of England, but they carried with them the doctrinal statements of the Mother Church, and there would have been no charge of heresy had they remained in the fold and taught ‘Christian Perfection.’ The real causes of separation were psychological, not theological. They had to do with the nature of man, not the nature of God. We are now able to recognize this basic fact, and in planning for Unity we must give it its place of supreme importance.

This will not be easy, and before we try to discover the types of human nature which must be satisfied, attention may well be called to two obstacles in the way of progress which are so illogical and unjustifiable that once they are known they ought to be quickly removed. The first is practical, and if we resummon the social expert whom we dismissed a moment ago, he will help us to see the unworthiness of one of the causes of a divided Christendom. The World Almanac for 1911 names 166 different Christian organizations in the United States; and, either consciously or unconsciously, the heads of each organization, the editors of all the papers published in the interest of each of the organizations, the professors in the training schools for ministers of all these denominations, the writers and publishers of all the books in defense of the peculiar tenets of each of these 166 churches, oppose any consolidation which would put them out of business. If Christian Unity were realized in the state in which I live, one man from one office could do the work now done by seven highly paid and respected officials. The influence of the sectarian press is a striking example of sectarian inertia and opposition to progress toward Unity.

In the United States, 86 papers are published in the interest of the Protestant Episcopal Church. These papers support wholly, or in part, a large number of editors, printers, and contributors. Other denominations use even more printers’ ink. In the very nature of the case these editors, printers, and contributors must take themselves very seriously as useful public servants, and that seriousness blocks advance toward Unity.

There are in the United States 162 theological seminaries, whose 1350 professors are engaged in earning their salaries by teaching coming clergymen that the particular emphasis for which their church stands in divided Christendom is still worth fighting for. It seems, therefore, as if the leaders of thought were, by a cruel necessity, opposed to unity.

On the other hand, just because they are leaders of thought, there is hope that they will see the strength and the righteousness of the movement toward Unity and be willing to lay down their official lives to advance it. The pressure of the demand of the missionary who sees the weakness of a divided front in the foreign field is forcing our Board officials to think seriously. The growing influence and circulation of undenominational Christian weekly and quarterly publications is showing openminded editors the stupidity of trying to compete in influencing public opinion.

Theological seminaries are coming into closer relation with great universities, as in the cases of Union with Columbia and Andover with Harvard, and such association must make for breadth. There is, therefore, proof that even these naturally opposing forces are weakening their opposition to the great cause of the Unity of Christendom. When the men who constitute them realize the situation, they will rapidly remove such opposition, and laymen will follow their lead. Just because this is not an age interested in theological speculation, those who still attend church are most obedient to authority. They will let their leaders think Unity for them as willingly as they now let them think sectarianism for them.

The other obstacle is found in the inconsistent way in which even enlightened thinkers use the Bible as an authority. Very few advocates of verbal inspiration can be found to-day. Indeed, most leaders of thought in all the churches have accepted in part at least the Higher Criticism. But when it comes to the proof texts of their own sectarian basis, then they forget their modern scholarship and criticism, and go back to verbal inspiration.

A Baptist scholar may agree that St. Paul’s rabbinical training made him adopt a mode of exegesis not binding on a modern thinker, but when it comes to the statement in Romans VI, 4, that Christians are buried with Christ in baptism, he insists that every word is straight from God. There is to-day in the Methodist Church a distinctly rationalistic tendency in its thought of inspiration. Many Methodist scholars teach that St. John’s Gospel is an interpretation rather than a verbatim report, but they know that the thought in the third chapter of that Gospel, ‘Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God,’ fell in exactly those words from the lips of the Lord.

I suppose the majority of Anglican scholars accept the documentary hypothesis of the Gospels, agreeing that in the First Gospel we have a compilation freely made of older documents, and that some of the words put into the mouth of Jesus are not the very words he spoke, but words which the Evangelist felt expressed his meaning. Most of them, however, forget their scholarship when they quote St. Matthew XXVIII, 20, and insist that Jesus uttered the very words, ‘Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world,’ and that He meant, as the Prayer-Book puts it, that He ‘would be with the ministers of apostolic succession.’

In this very discussion of Christian Unity, we continually hear men of very liberal views of inspiration say, ‘We must work and pray for what our Lord prayed for, for in his high priestly prayer did He not say, “Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word; that they all may be one; as Thou, Father, art in me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in us.” ’

If they were consistent they would recognize that these may not be the words of our Lord at all, but the words which the author of the Fourth Gospel thought that He may have prayed.²

Still, there are tendencies at work which will force greater consistency. The interpretation of the Bible which is really being read to-day is not issued in the interest of any sect, but by publishers bidding for a wider circle of readers than the membership of any one society. They encourage non-partisan teachers in unsectarian universities to publish their opinions, and even sectarian teachers, writing for commentaries like the Expositors, the International, and the Westminster, or for modern Bible dictionaries and encyclopædias, make an earnest effort not to write as special pleaders, but as careful and judicious scholars.

Sometimes, it is true, sectarian bigotry is commended as church loyalty. In one of our Episcopal papers a thoughtful writer recently suggested that the difference between a loyal investigator and a disloyal rationalist was that the one approached all debatable questions with a bias in favor of the Church’s past belief, while the disloyal rationalist began his investigation with a feeling that the Church was probably wrong and that he could prove it if he tried.

The distinction seemed to me an important one when I read it, but the very next day a prominent Mormon — a graduate of the University of Michigan — to whom I had given a copy of Dr. I. Wood bridge Riley’s psychological study, The Founder of Mormonism, said to me, ‘The trouble with that book is that the author approaches the study of Joseph Smith with a prejudice against him. He begins with a definite belief that the founder of my church was not a prophet of God, and that he must try his best to prove it. But I, as one brought up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day-Saints, feel strongly that such a bias disqualifies the writer for my respect.’

If this apparently admirable point of view of the prejudiced investigator prevented Mormons from seeing the truth about their false prophet, I was forced to wonder whether it was a helpful point of view for any one to take. Why need there be any more bias in the mind of the investigator of spiritual problems than in the mind of the investigator of scientific matters? Perhaps when we make religion, and not theology, the important matter, partisanship will cease. The theologian reasons deductively, and deductive reasoning requires making assumptions and holding to them dogmatically. The study of religion, on the other hand, can be carried on inductively, and preconceptions of any kind are a recognized hindrance to honest inductive investigation.

III

There seems, then, to be hope that progress can be made, and it becomes increasingly important to see which way is really forward. If our argument is valid we must try to ascertain what the religious needs of man actually are, so that the United Church of the future may provide for them. It is believed that there are really but three varieties of religious experience; but three ways in which men approach God, or, perhaps we ought to say, are reached by God.

Some men have always satisfied their religious craving through the senses, — music for their ears, vestments and lights, color and images for their eyes, incense for their noses, beads for their fingers. In the oldest branches of the Christian Church, the Greek, the Roman, and the Anglican, provision for these means of grace has been especially provided. If it be insisted that such methods of worship were far from the mind of Christ and were borrowed from paganism, such an insistence but increases the proof that some men always have felt and probably always will feel after God, and find Him through their senses. Though superstition and idolatry have resulted from such sensuous means, it is also true that a high type of Christian mysticism has been developed, and noble saints through these visible emblems have found Him who is invisible. The holiness of beauty and the beauty of holiness are related to each other. Art and music have advanced because religion has used them. Religion has been a power to millions because art and music have helped her. Therefore, the United Church of the future must provide for ritualistic worship and for experts to conduct it.

But there always have been, and always will be, those who are irritated rather than helped by elaborate ceremonial. Like Hegel, they worship by thinking. Doubtless many of them will always be individualists, but those who assemble themselves together will do so to listen to addresses by thoughtful, ethical teachers delivered in lecture halls rather than in churches. Their leaders are prophets and not priests. Unitarians and Friends, among the sects of to-day, illustrate the extreme of this type, and they have won credit for intellectual courage and moral earnestness. There can be no doubt that they find God by thus mentally feeling after Him, because they have an heroic passion for truth and righteousness which God alone can inspire. In a United Christendom, provision must be made for those who find God through the rational and logical powers of the mind.

And in the third place there are the ‘twice-born,’ those who satisfy their religious craving through the emotions. To the thousands who were spiritually dying in spite of the ritual of Romans and the intellectualism of Anglicans, the appeal to the emotions by Wesley and Whitfield brought the breath of life. The leaders of the old historical churches, with their dignified and stilted ritual, and the preachers of a rational gospel of conduct may feel that the revivalist is irreverent and illogical, but they cannot deny that many — who have not been reached by them — he brings to God through the Christ who, they know, has saved them from their sins. And the emotional appeal finds as many responding hearts to-day as it ever did. Gypsy Smith and Billy Sunday continue the work of Whitfield and Finney and Moody.

The United Church of the future will not be Catholic unless it provides for those to whom God comes in a subliminal uprush. The story is told of a prim English curate, who once entered a meeting-house in which a company of Holy Rollers were manifesting the fruits of the Spirit. He pushed his way to the platform and at last got a hearing. ‘Don’t you know,’ he said, ‘that God is not the God of disorder but of harmony? When Solomon built a temple to his glory we are told that there was neither the sound of axe nor hammer, but in holy silence the sacred walls arose.’ To which the exhorter retorted, ‘But, parson, we aren’t building a house, we’re blasting the rocks.’

No doubt these three methods of religious expression and divine appropriation combine in different ways. Ritualistic priests deliver thoughtful sermons, and some of them preach revivals which they prefer to call ‘Missions.’ Puritan reasoners introduce liturgical services of a restrained and limited character. They even replace the stained glass which their fathers smashed. Christian Scientists do not appropriate grace by what other people call logic, and they must, like the twice-born, get it through the subconscious mind, and yet their public services are as unemotional as Quaker meetings. ‘Blasters of the Rocks,’ like Dowie and General Booth, array themselves in Episcopal vestments and decorate themselves with brass buttons. Still it is believed that these three are the basic types, and that if provision is made in one organization for them, that organization will give adequate spiritual help to the vast majority of men.

Is it possible to evolve or to create such an organization? Unless it can be done, Christian Unity is not desirable, because the religious necessities of all sorts and conditions of men will not be provided for. If our argument is valid, a Church which does not want Christian Unity on such a basis does not honestly want Christian Unity at all.

IV

A group of influential theologians will protest at once that the proposal to create an organization is a heresy which denies the faith. They will urge, that, in the mind of Christ the Church is one already, and therefore all we need to do is to realize that Unity.

‘The Church is essentially one, as there is one God, one Christ, one Spirit, one fellowship.³ The Unity of the Church is not produced by man. We may strive in vain to produce it. It already exists. It is an actual organic unity of believers through Christ, which we can deny, but which we can neither create nor destroy.’

Surely this is misty mysticism. One may talk in the same vague way of the ‘Solidarity of the Human Race’ and the ‘Brotherhood of Man,’ because God has made of one blood all nations of men, but that does not mean that the parliament of nations and the federation of the world has been realized, or can be, simply by thinking so. The President of Oberlin is a Congregationalist, and perhaps therefore a hopeless individualist, but there is much wisdom in this warning in his Reconstruction of Theology. ‘ In truth it needs to be said with emphasis that we understand better what we mean by personal relation and by friendship, than we do what we mean by organic relation and organism.’

This contention that the Christian Church is an ‘organism’ is the theological obstacle in the way of Christian Unity which will die hardest, because it lies at the basis of the dogma of ‘the Valid Ministry’ held so tenaciously by those churches which call themselves ‘historic.’ They insist that the life of the organism depends on its continuity, and that, therefore, the tree of Christianity must be in connection with the apostolic root or it will die even though it have a name to live. It is contended that St. Paul argues for this conception of the Church in the First Epistle to the Corinthians and in the Epistle to the Ephesians, and that his argument is in harmony with the argument in the fifteenth chapter of St. John where the analogy of the Vine and its branches is used. I remember well a picture which once hung in the library of a High-Church bishop. In the centre was a great tree with three branches. The trunk was the undivided Church of the first three centuries. The branches were the Roman, the Eastern, and the Anglican churches, all in vital connection with the trunk of the tree. Perched on little branches were foolish heretics sawing themselves off from the great branches. Off in the corners of the picture were Luther and Calvin and Servetus and Wesley and Joseph Smith, Jr., and other ecclesiastics, each planting a poor sickly twig, cut from the great tree of the Catholic Church. But this picture when carefully considered, fails to prove its point, for even the Joseph-Smith-Jr. cutting, once it takes root, becomes just as much of an organism as the parent tree, and it is conceivable that such a cutting may grow into a tree which, judged by its fruits, is a better organism than the old tree itself. As has been wisely said by the Bishop of Michigan, ‘It is by fruits, not by roots, we are to be judged.’

An illustration from another form of group-life will make this truth still more clearly evident. The American revolutionists deliberately broke with the mother country and created a new nation. Their Constitution provided for a radically different method of national solidarity and continuance; but will any one assert that at the present day the United States of America is not a living organism in as real a sense as the Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland?

Theology may make connection with God depend upon theories of valid ordination, but religion has a confidence of its own that ‘God is no respecter of persons but in every nation he that feareth Him and worketh righteousness is accepted with Him,’ even though he be not purified according to accredited theological methods. Therefore, even if this organic conception of the Church were true, it would not prove that men’s religious needs might not be better provided for if that article of the theological creed were denied. We are not interested in preserving dogma, but in saving life.

V

What, then, shall this organization be? What is necessary is an organization of religion which shall, with equal authority and credit, provide for the three forms of religious need so that one in search of his soul’s health may pass from one to the other with no more suspicion or loss of standing than a citizen of Massachusetts experiences in going from Boston to Los Angeles in search of his bodily health.

Present forms of organization must, of course, be given fair consideration. The Congregational will hardly serve, because it is rather a protest against organization than a form of it, and the present development of organization in the Congregational and Baptist and Campbellite bodies, because of the need of missionary enterprises, is admittedly illogical. The Presbyterian and the Episcopal forms of organization remain, and of the two the Episcopal form has proved itself rather more permanent, and yet more adaptable and flexible than the Presbyterian, which historically was created in the interest of a definite theological system. Indeed, to-day, the distinction between the Congregational and Presbyterian is rapidly disappearing.

Against the Episcopal form of organization is the undoubted fact that it easily falls into sacerdotal temptation, and, because of its historical association, is almost inevitably aristocratic. Possibly the Methodist form of Episcopal leadership may be more useful than either the Roman, the Anglican, or the Greek, though it must be admitted that the Methodist bishop is considered quite as impressive a personage as others who hold that title.

But when once the theological dogma of sacerdotalism is gone, that matter can be decided on practical grounds. By the preservation of the historic Episcopate this truth of fundamental importance will be safeguarded, and it is a truth so important that risks may well be taken to prevent its being forgotten — that Christianity is a historic religion.

The Holy Catholic Church must not only welcome to-day and to-morrow all sorts and conditions of men who profess and call themselves Christians, but she must also claim kinship with all the saints of all the Christian centuries, and make her own the fruits of their victories over weakness and sin. None of the churches of to-day appropriate the Christian heritage, because they are interested in dogma rather than life. Those who boast that they are ‘historic ’ overlook the values of the last five hundred years of Christian history; while the nonconformist churches fail to make their own the treasures of the first five hundred years. Is not the Anglican Church right in the feeling that the possession of the historic Episcopate gives a title to this whole heritage and a continual reminder of its value? Therefore, is not the proposal to give Episcopal orders to the churches that have lost the apostolic succession one which should be seriously considered? There seems to be no more certain way of making the Church, as a wise householder, take out of the treasure things new and old.

The revival of interest in Christian Unity dates from the Edinburgh Conference. Here two thousand earnest men agreed to forget their differences, which meant their theology, and plan together to give the heathen what they all agreed the heathen really needed — the Christian Life. Such a wonderful exhibition of brotherly love suggested the idea that it might be possible to hold an equally representative conference in which the religious values that all agreed upon should be put in the background, and where there should be a frank discussion of the theological dogmas about which most of them differed.

This was much as if, because a convention of mothers had shown complete unanimity of opinion in praising the glory and dignity of motherhood and the beauty and promise of childhood, some wise one should decide that it would be a good time to secure agreement on the best formula for sterilizing milk.

The suggestion to call a world conference to consider matters of theological difference seemed to be inspired by the spirit of truth; but if our argument is valid, it might rather have come from that other spirit, who, on occasion, is said to disguise himself as an angel of light, and who, Milton to the contrary notwithstanding, has a sense of humor and perhaps said to himself, ‘How much more exciting it would be to see these pious brethren fight!’

The real lesson to be learned is that the Edinburgh Conference was only possible because the tolerant charity of religion was for the time given full sway, the divisive influence of theology being excluded. Christian Unity will never come until the followers of Jesus Christ realize that his religion depends, not upon exact thinking, but upon Christlike living.