The Modernist's Quest for God

ANONYMOUS

ONE of the outstanding ethical and religious leaders of our day told me this story: —

‘Before I left home on a recent trip I was visited by a man whom I had long respected for his sincerity, devotion, and spiritual insight. He had come to tell me a dream. “In my dream,” said he, “I thought I saw you standing on a hilltop. And we — a great host of us — were crowded around, waiting eagerly for what you might say. We could see your lips forming the word, but no sound came out of your mouth. We tried to help you by calling out the word your lips were shaping, but we also were dumb. And that word was God.” ‘

The story, I think, will have meaning for thousands of truth-seekers in the camps of both Jews and Christians. The whole movement dubbed Modernist, the movement which has set out to reconcile the knowledge and aspiration of this generation within the framework of existing religious organizations, strains to say the great, the essential word ‘God’ in tones which will make our yearning spirits hear. It is dumb. Out of its silence comes no small part of what strength Fundamentalism possesses. Even more assuredly is agnosticism born of that same silence. The religious problem of our time is whether Modernism can find a way to say the word ‘God’ in a voice of conviction and command.

Once I believed that it had found the way. I can think to-day of no greater satisfaction than to have that faith renewed. Because I am persuaded that the difficulties in the way of the fulfillment of that hope are not peculiarly mine, but are shared by others both within and without our various churches, I venture to ask them forth.

I was brought up in orthodox Presbyterianism, but, perhaps because it was not so fearful as Fundamentalism has since become, I was not continually reminded of its uglier, more irrational side. Indeed, as I grew older it became a source of some surprise to me that those whom I loved best were so much better than their creeds, so much kinder than their God. My father believed that God would damn forever all those who did not accept salvation through Christ, but never once could I get him to say that any particular sinner was damned. ‘That,’ he would say, ‘rests with God.’

Nevertheless, in spite of the fact that I saw in the life of those closest to me only the lovelier side of oldfashioned Christianity, — its strict integrity, its real kindliness, its sense of obligation to others of the human race, its sure confidence in the reign of God and in His personal care for us, His sinful children, — the time came when my own choice lay between a liberal reinterpretation of the Bible and the creeds, and agnosticism. I chose what to-day is called Modernism.

The religious Liberalism of the prewar period, during which I studied for the ministry, was for most of us a pleasant and satisfying faith. Biblical criticism helped us to reject the scientific absurdities and ethical monstrosities which cumber the earlier of the Old Testament narratives, while at the same time it enabled us to claim uniqueness for the Bible by reason of its graphic witness to an extraordinary development of the ethical and religious sense out of crude beginnings.

As for a reconciliation of evolution and religion, that seemed to us so thoroughly achieved, thanks to John Fiske and others, that it was hard for us to understand the mental anguish of some of the great Victorians over this question.

The old creeds were more of a problem, but it is remarkable what can be achieved by a resolute will, not so much to believe as to reinterpret. As a last resort one could always fall back on the creeds as great hymns of the faith. (Parenthetically I may observe that I was always troubled by this process, which I have since concluded is a great weakness of one type of Modernism. Above all things our times require intellectual integrity. The tortuous metaphysics that enables a man to repeat, Sunday after Sunday, the simple language of the Apostles’ Creed — which, on rare occasions he explains, he believes in a sense utterly different from the plain meaning of the words — scarcely fits him to be the educator of children or the guide of adults in the intellectual and ethical difficulties which press us round about. He ought to ponder earnestly that admirable text: ‘Let your yea be yea; and your nay, nay.’)

In fact, if not in name, for the elaborate theology of sin and salvation which had occupied historic Christianity we young Liberals substituted a kind of Ritschlianism; or, to put it less technically, we were caught up in the ‘Back to Jesus’ movement. We talked a good deal of ‘the religion of Jesus as contrasted with the religion about Jesus.’ The only sense in which we remained distinctively Christian was in our veneration of Jesus of Nazareth. God, we said, could best be imderstood by saying that He was like Jesus. That is, Jesus was the supreme revelation of God. (Which, in its way, is a religion about Jesus.)

We were interested in individual well-being, but for the enthusiasm of a Jonathan Edwards or a John Wesley for saving particular sinners we were inclined to substitute an honest, but far less intense, interest in ‘saving society’ or in ‘the social gospel,’ or — in New Testament language — in ‘the Kingdom of God,’ Rauschenbusch was the greatest prophet of this faith. We admired him, but few of us followed him into his uncompromising Socialism. Unconsciously we made out of this Jesus whom we venerated a highminded, gentlemanly, but eminently practical social reformer, who, owing to the evil forces of his time, became a martyr for Truth. In the retrospect our conception seems almost as far removed from the intense, exacting, proletarian, miracle-working Jewish rebel of Saint Luke’s Gospel as was the traditional Christ of theology.

This religion we buttressed by a pragmatism taken from William James, and later by much talk of creative evolution borrowed from Bergson; and in both cases we expanded what we had taken to an extent which must have vastly surprised those masters. To all doubters we proclaimed joyfully: ‘Try our religion and see. It must be true, for it works.’

Not every one of my seminary contemporaries of those pre-war days found the complete satisfaction of this new religion. Most of us had to suppress, at times, doubts of one sort or another. But in general, and for a considerable number, Liberal Christianity seemed as strong as it was delightful. We had God without the Devil, an eternal Heaven without necessarily an eternal Hell. Truth and Beauty, we were assured, must prevail and Evil be vanquished, for God is Love.

As I look over this description of Modernism I realize its inadequacy. For one thing. Modernism is amorphous, and there are wide divergences within it. Some of its adherents believe more than I have indicated and some less. I was amazed recently to discover in a club of young clergymen how many rejected a belief in immortality. They accepted it neither on the arguments of philosophy nor on the authority of revealed religion. As for the alleged scientific proof of psychical research, that seemed to disclose an immortality so petty and dull that extinction were a boon to be coveted. All those doubters were in the Church. Toward the Church itself Modernists greatly differ in point of view. Some, curiously enough, are High Churchmen; some are Low. Likewise a difference in emphasis exists with regard to the social gospel, some theological Liberals being hidebound social Conservatives. It is not without significance that Modernism in America so far has found its strength, not among the masses, but among the well-to-do. It is more at home on Fifth Avenue than on Main Street.

Not only do these varieties of Modernist belief make any brief inclusive description of it difficult, but doubtless my own later questioning has deprived my statement of the appealing power which the genius and sincerity of a Fosdick or a Coffin give to their expositions of Liberal Christianity. But greater eloquence or emotional warmth in stating a typical Protestant Modernist position would not of itself meet the difficulties inherent in it.

In just what aspect these difficulties present themselves will vary as individuals vary in temperament and experience. At bottom and for most men, however, they arise not so much out of the impossibility of reconciling science with religion, — some sort of religion, —or evolution with God,—some sort of God, — but out of making the supremacy of a God of Love square with the realities of our universe. H. G. Wells cut the Gordian knot by refusing to speculate about the relation between his ‘invisible King’ and a mysterious X, the cosmic force or principle. It is just that, identification which is of chief concern to both learned and unlearned. Is ours a friendly universe? Is love the law of the universe, or must it be asserted by men who are greater than their universe by so much as they have learned to understand it and still to love one another?

Those religious leaders who make much of the tendency of science to explain the constitution of atoms and worlds in terms primarily of energy, rather than of inert matter, miss the point. Christian faith and Christian ethics were never so much bound up in the old philosophical struggle between materialism and idealism as in the question of the nature and quality of whatever energy or idea may be postulated as fundamental. To the Modernist, whether Christian or Jew, who has formed his conception of God from the lofty teachings of the Prophets, it is a matter almost of indifference whether science compels him to doubt the existence of any sort of God so long as it compels him to doubt the supremacy of One who is Love, whose care is over all His works.

The Modernist talks of the religion of Jesus rather than of the religion about Jesus. If anything can be clear concerning the religion of Jesus it is His teaching of God’s fatherly care for every created thing. Not a sparrow falls to the ground without His knowledge. The very hairs of our heads are numbered by Him. His is the anxious, saving love of the shepherd for the lost sheep, the father for the wandering son. Is this the God of nature, careless of the individual and careful of the type? A recent scientific writer has been at some pains to show us that there is more pleasure and less pain in nature and even in the relation of hunter and hunted than might be assumed from Huxley’s famous reference to ‘Nature, red of tooth and claw.’ That may well be true. It is certainly true that mutual aid has been a great factor in evolution and is essential to the very existence of the higher orders of life. Nevertheless, it is hard to find evidence of the supremacy of love in the long, marvelous, but incredibly wasteful processes of evolution. And it is wholly gratuitous to drag in, as some Christian apologists have done, a generous doctrine of immortality for the fulfillment of the aspirations and the mending of the broken spirits of those who through long ages in darkness groped for light.

These difficulties in our day arise at least as much from the conclusions of modern psychology, of any of contending schools, as from modern biology. It is easy enough for Modernism, in the interest both of science and of an ethical conception of God, to reject the older notions of the effects of Adam’s fall and the consequent depravity of the race. It is not so easy to reject the evidence from the opposing camps of behaviorists and Freudians that man carries about within himself those limitations and incapacities which frustrate his own highest aspirations. By understanding them he may deal more wisely with them, but spiritually he is sorely crippled by his inheritance.

The pragmatic justification of religion does not resolve these problems; it attempts to flank them and to fight out the battle on different ground. ‘Our interpretation of religion works,’ is its constant cry. But does it? And in what sense is the religion which works to be identified with Christianity?

For me it was the Great War which brought these questions to a head. They would have existed without the war, but, had it not been for that tragedy, my own absorption in the manifold and congenial tasks of a parish minister might have left me with neither the desire nor the intellectual energy to come to close grips with anything disturbing to a religion so dear to me, for a thousand reasons, as my own drastic reinterpretation of the faith of my fathers. When the so-called Christian world plunged into the dreadful holocaust of the Great War, when Christian fought against Christian with more than pagan cruelty, I found refuge in the familiar half-truth: ‘It is not Christianity that has failed; Christianity has never been tried.’ But then, where was my assurance that Christianity worked? Not only had the great multitude of professing Christians and all the organized churches never tried the Christianity that might have prevented the war; even its own Liberal leaders had nothing unique to say. At best Modernist religion gave a certain pious emphasis to Wilsonian political Liberalism, and such inspiration as it had was drawn far more from his phrases than from the extraordinarily difficult sayings of that pacifist rebel, Jesus of Nazareth. International Socialism was tried and found wanting before the floods of Nationalist passion, but, at least, even during the war it sought to hold its Stockholm Conference. Christianity, which is international or it is nothing, never even tried. Its erstwhile Liberal leaders were too busy getting this piece of ribbon or that by their services, as members of a class exempt from combatant service, in maintaining the morale of the men who had to fight.

It was not Modernists as a group, but simple and primitive believers, theological Fundamentalists, Mennonites, and Molokans, who raised once more the issue of the irreconcilability of Christianity and war. Not only were the Modernists not uncompromising pacifists, but when they were confronted with the problem of objectors to war imprisoned for conscience’ sake they all passed by on the other side. When, at the very close of the war, the sufferings of some of the Molokan objectors were reported to a Modernist leader and professional peacetime pacifist, his only comment was: ‘Absolutist objectors are nothing but traitors.’ In short, these leaders, who could not reconcile the stern theology of the Church Fathers with the religion of Jesus, in war-time — however it may be since — had no difficulty in reconciling it with bombs, poison gas, secret treaties, and all the lies of official propaganda. They remained blissfully unaware of ‘the greatest irony of history: that the proudest, most militaristic nations of the world should have taken a pacifist Jewish peasant for their God.’

And this failure of the Modernists in war-time, as I sadly came to believe, was not a personal dereliction in time of extraordinary strain. It was of a piece with their general failure to bring to our struggling world either vision or courage for its salvation. Fundamentalism at its best — for example, in some of the work of the Salvation Army — has to its credit the dramatic healing of sick souls. Who ever heard similar tales of twice-born men as proofs of the living power of the Modernist word?

But there is the social gospel. In so far as it is identified with Modernism it is one of its chief ornaments. I have no desire to minimize its past achievements or future possibilities. But out of much experience I am compelled to assert that this social gospel, at least in America, has made little impression upon the working class, among whom Christianity had its origin; that it has made no original contribution to social theory; and that it has not so much reinterpreted Jesus to our time as weakened the staggering challenge of His teaching to a generation which finds His utter unconcern in the processes of production and distribution well-nigh incomprehensible.

This last assertion may be met with a multitude of conflicting statements as to what we really know about Jesus and His teaching. I know that some of these interpretations make Him the prophet of a gradual and wholly practicable programme of social amelioration, by which we shall all eventually become well-to-do, if not rich, and yet get through the eye of the needle. Others make him scarcely more than a pious Jewish fanatic. Here it is less important to argue the validity of these interpretations than to point out the havoc wrought to Modernism by its own conflicting statements as to what Jesus really said and did. How shall our perplexed world be expected to look for commanding leadership to a figure about whom and whose teaching critical scholars cannot more nearly agree? And if He is to be reduced to the stature of His portrait by such Christian critics as Kirsopp Lake, what, in heaven’s name, have we left of distinctive Christianity? Behind all such queries lies the more fundamental problem: Can any man who lived in the first century be the adequate guide for men who live in the twentieth, with its vastly different scientific outlook and social and economic organization?

It is such questions as these that have compelled me, sorrowing, to doubt the real vitality or significance of Modernism. More than it realizes, it is living on its inherited capital — the stored-up memories and affections that gather about a traditional faith and the art and poetry of Christianity. As one of its most eloquent expounders said, in a moment of discouragement: ‘I preach on many things, but always on the periphery of life. Sometimes I think I am afraid to tackle the central problem.’ That central problem, he went on to say, is the question of God and His relation to men. Has He made us, given us such lofty aspirations and glorious dreams, only to leave us to the mercy of the stupidities and fears and prejudices which lead us, scarcely knowing what we do, into the prison house of our own acquisitive society and its inevitable wars? Are not these great human incapacities as truly His gift as our dreams? Shall we be saved by faith in Him or by a stern endeavor to take the universe and ourselves as we find them and then to see at what points we can remould our life nearer to the highest aspiration of our race? Has the Modernistic interpretation of the Christian, Jewish, or any other ancient

religious faith an answer to these questions in terms of a great and convincing affirmation of God?

Perhaps; but thousands of us who have strained our ears do not hear that word. Neither do we see in the lives of those who profess to have heard it satisfactory evidence of its power. They who claim to know the supremacy of a God of Love looked not to love but to illimitable violence for their protection in the great emergency of war. In their daily lives they too are caught in the shoddy meshes of compromise that we know so well. What, then, does it avail to tell us of some inner comfort they derive? If we are worthy of the quest of Truth we cannot turn aside to enter any paradise of illusion.

And yet I who write these lines — and thousands like me — am by no means indifferent to the struggles of Modernism with Fundamentalism. Some of its issues seem to us petty, unreal, or beside the point. But if, out of the struggle, a religious leader will arise who can say in tones of triumphant truth the majestic word that many lips seek to frame, what joy and power might he bring to life, what peace to our hearts!