Christ, Christianity and the Bible

Christianity

WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY?

WHAT is Christianity?

The question seems a belated one.

It never was more pertinent than now. Its pertinency rests upon two facts.

First: the modern drift in Christianity and its absolute failure.

Second: the phenomenal triumph of primitive Christianity.

The modern drift is antagonistic to doctrine and repudiates the miraculous.

It sets aside the virgin birth, has no toleration for atonement by sacrificial death, and positively refuses to accept the bodily resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.

It holds that God is the Father of all men. Each man is inherently a son of God. He has in him all the elements of the divine lineage. Exercise and culture are alone needed to reveal these elements and demonstrate this lineage. Salvation is not the redemption of a child of the Devil, but recovery of a child of God from the hands of the Devil. Salvation is the restoration of the individual to the consciousness of this relationship; but salvation is effectively individual only as it is primarily social. The time has passed (so we are told) when the individual may be discussed and his social condition ignored. To seek out an individual here and there and endeavor to redeem or recover him while the environment remains unchanged, is a waste of force: as foolish as it would be to spend millions on remedies for people sick with malaria in a pestilential and malarial district, and ignore the condition of the district. True wisdom would demand first of all that the district be purged, the environment made healthy, the cause of malaria destroyed.

Human beings are neither sinning nor suffering because a possible first man away back somewhere ate forbidden fruit at the insistent appeal of his too persistent wife. Men are sinning and suffering because social conditions are all wrong. These wrong conditions fill the multitude with discouragement and depression. They are unable to breathe an inspiring life force. They cannot obtain sufficient impulse to live above low levels. The laws, the customs, the inequalities of life, hedge them like brutes in a corral. This corralling and hedging of humanity en masse, while the few pull away from the crowd and create an environment satisfactory to themselves at the expense of the crowd, is the raison d’être for all evil conditions. Let us have right legislation. Let us make right laws. The moment the social condition enables a man to discover the divine things in him, he will live right by preference. We are no longer to spend eloquence, prayer and time on revivals, and now and then, here and there, get an individual to live fairly right in spite of hindering conditions. The sermon of the preacher should appeal to the law-maker rather than to the law-breaker; it should arouse men, not to the danger of a hell far off, but to a hell near at hand, the hell of unjust laws, of sanitary neglect, of oppression of man by man.

Social redemption! that is the watchword.

Social salvation! that is the crying need.

All this (we are told) is to be accomplished by appealing to the divine in man, to his hitherto ignored resources. This appeal can be made of avail only by setting up some human figure in which this divine life has been fully proved and clearly portrayed. In the nature of the case, for a modernist Christian, such a person is to be found alone in our Lord Jesus Christ. By such he is now hailed, and continually announced, as the advanced man, the quintessent demonstration of evolution as applied to humanity, the way-shower, the exemplar and true copy. He is incarnate altruism. His whole life was self-denial. His daily interest was in social conditions. To him society was the objective, the individual an incident. His teachings, when fairly construed, involve the overthrow of the old, and the bringing in of a radically new society, in which the divine life in man may have an opportunity to unfold. His doctrines, when analyzed, are explosive; if practically carried out would be revolutionary. He is, in short, the true socialist. If we follow him as such, if we work out his intent, we shall have individual salvation, but we shall have it as a consequent of social redemption.

There may be shining worlds beyond this. There may be holy cities with golden streets. There may be robes of righteousness and trees of life. What we need to do, as Christians, is to take care of the world in which we now live, build first-class holy cities here, see that the streets are well paved, and the sewers in order, put fit clothing on the backs of the poor, fill the mouths of the hungry with actual bread, make the hours of labor minimum, and the hours of personal culture maximum, and thus weave a garment of civic, social and individual righteousness that shall stand the test of this world or any other. In other words, we are to live the life that now is – and let that which is to come take care of itself.

This is the trend of the modern drift.

It is an endeavor to bring the church down out of the clouds, place it on the level of human experience, meet present human needs in practical ways, and establish a system of natural, rational and universal ethics.

And yet – in spite of this widely heralded liberalism; in spite of the effort to accommodate itself to the rationalism, the unbelief and downright infidelity of the hour; in spite of the determination to cut loose from the primaries of the first century and ally itself with the fast-going advance of the twentieth, this movement in the name of Christianity has not succeeded in winning and holding the multitude either to a personal and modified Christ, or to a reorganized and elastic church.

The churches in which it flourishes; the churches which have renounced faith in the supernatural and miraculous; the churches which have swung the doors wide open on the hinges of worldly wisdom and easy tolerance; the churches which have substituted natural generation for supernatural regeneration, evolution instead of revolution, the working out of human life, instead of the coming in of divine life; the churches which teach that man is to go up and take hold of God, instead of God coming down to take hold on man; the churches which are broad enough to allow men of all faiths, and men of no faith at all, to occupy their pulpits, are not overcrowded, nor have righteousness and holiness extraordinarily increased in their neighborhood.

On the contrary, in face of every effort to conciliate the naturalism in man, men look upon these churches, and the Christianity they advocate, with suspicion. They see these churches have their goods still marked with the words, “supernatural,” “miraculous.” It is true, these churches may practically put such goods out of sight; even then, men will not be attracted beyond the expression of a condescending tolerance; and while admitting, as they will, that the church is earnestly endeavoring to get rid of its ancient incubus of theology, free its hands and take hold of the plow handle of progress, ready, if needs be, to drive a furrow deep enough to bury all memories of primitive faith, yet will they turn away from that kind of a church and that sort of Christianity, with the feeling that all this action on the part of the church is but another feeble effort at competitive morality. They will turn from it and seek their own organizations wherein no issue of the supernatural has ever been raised; where the quasi personality and questionable existence of an unseen God are not at all discussed; and where man and his present life are the only subjects deemed worthy of consideration.

If this drift as thus indicated shall continue another ten years, and enlist the support and open advocacy of leading and representative thinkers in the church; if the theological seminaries shall continue to turn out on graduation day, with their all too mechanical regularity, men who do not believe in the virgin birth, who find no real reason why our Lord Jesus Christ should have died at all, except the fatality of his genius that he was too far ahead of his time and was “caught by the whirling wheel of the world’s evil and torn in pieces”; if the repudiation of the Bible as the final and inerrant revelation of God for this age shall continue so short a space as a decade, by that time, at the present rate of development, we shall have not only a very modern Christianity, a Christianity without miracles, without even a hint of the supernatural, but a Christianity without spiritual power or moral authority, standing as a delinquent on the street corners, and amid the hurry and rush of more vital things, begging permission simply to exist.

Over against this modern drift and its amplitude of failure stands the phenomenal success of original and primitive Christianity.

And yet, the conditions which confronted this nascent faith were appalling.

It was the era of materialism. Force was the prime minister, self-gratification the supreme legislator. Exaggerated superstition was balanced by decaying faith. It was a time of coordinately high mental activity, an intellectuality that cynically rejoiced at its own failure to solve the riddle of the universe, maliciously suggested new difficulties, raised barriers against its own research, and prostrating itself in the name of mere brutism, worshipped nature as the ready panderer to its worst passions, while owning it as a cruelly smiling and pitiless sphinx.

The one hundred and twenty men and women who faced the Roman world with the determination to impinge their faith upon it, seemed the most audaciously unwise of all forlorn and hopeless fanatics. They had neither wealth nor social standing. Their culture was at zero, their knowledge indifferent. Localism and tradition environed them, and the story they had to tell was not only an affront to the course of nature, but a direct repudiation of old faiths and cherished religions. Itself a religio illicita, Christianity challenged governmental law and invoked, logically, the keenest persecution. The mountains which surrounded Jerusalem were not so high, nor so difficult of ascent, as the prejudice far and near over which they needs must climb, even if they would gain but a tolerated hearing.

Yet they went forth! and so preached, that they not only saved and transfigured individuals, but so molded and transformed society, that in its every-day achievements, Christianity itself seemed like a miracle to astonished and silenced onlookers.

Startlingly enough this moulding of society, this overturning of old conditions – this bringing in of the radically new, so that their enemies said of them they had “turned the world upside down”; this repudiation of brutality and the exaltation of unselfishness; this building up of a condition in which a community now judged itself by the standards of chastity, righteousness and neighborly kindness; this renovation of whole centres of life till the erstwhile deserts wherein not a flower of gentleness had bloomed, now blossomed as gardens of delight, watered with never-ceasing streams of brotherly love – were produced, not by an appeal to society itself, not by denunciation of laws and customs, however bad, but by laying hold of a human soul, estimating it in value by the weight of a whole world, and changing the individual life.

This was the triumph of original and primitive Christianity.

In view of such a triumph and the unqualified failure of the modern drift which claims the name of Christianity, it should seem a perfectly legitimate and altogether pertinent question to ask,

“What is Christianity?”

The answer is given by the apostle Paul in his second letter to Timothy, his son in the faith, the preacher of his own ordination. He says:

“Our Saviour Jesus Christ.. has abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel.” (2 Timothy 1:10.)

According to this declaration, the Gospel is the good news that our Lord Jesus Christ came into the world to accomplish three things – abolish death, bring in a new life and reveal immortality. As the Gospel is the heart beat of Christianity, then the three things which proclaim its constituent and objective characteristic are:

The abolition of death.

The gift of a new life.

Immortality.

First – The abolition of death.

Death is a black fact. It is the shadow the sun never penetrates, the robber who steals the treasure more precious than gold, the guest who never waits to be invited, the intruder who feels at home whether in palace or in cot, has no respect of persons, and lays his hand with equal familiarity on the king upon his throne, or the tramp by the wayside, saying “come” to the sick, “tarry not” to the well, is sure of the old, and revels like a reaper in the harvest of the young. It breaks the plans and disorganizes the relations of life; and then, like a coarse comedian or a heartless satirist, compels those who survive to turn away from the memory of their dead, reorganize their lives and live on as though those who once lived with them and formed an intimate part of their daily experience had never existed.

Unless God himself shall intervene, death is the certain end of the longest life.

Side by side with the certainty of death are two things which give it emphasis: the brevity of life and its uncertainty.

How brief it is! what are sixty or seventy years as measured by hopes and fears, by splendor of genius, by forecasts that outreach the ages, by thoughts that climb and climb with ease to the infinite, by energy of mind, which, rising superior to the combined hindrances of every day, is always peering beyond the last endeavor, and stretching itself towards unbroken continuance, cries, “What next?” Extract from the allotted time of three score years and ten, the puling days of infancy, the immature years of youth, the hours of indecision as to the route to take, the right profession to follow; take the hours given to eating and drinking (that eating and drinking which in spite of the glamor we throw about it is simply repairing the mechanical waste and renewing the chemical energy that will enable us to go on a little while and a little way farther); take out the time spent in sleep – in practical nonentity – and the remainder is a pitiful handful of years, so few, that to number them seems like a mathematical mockery, like numerical trifling.

And the uncertainty of life! What man is he who can assure himself of ten days? In that time he may die, be buried and be forgotten by the world that scarcely heard the tolling of his funeral bell, and had no time to stay and hear the falling of the grave clods upon the coffin lid.

This emphasis of brevity and uncertainty has affected men more or less from the beginning. In the hour when Christianity was born it affected them well nigh unto delirium. So brief was the vision of life, so tumultuous its incidents, so conscious were men of its uncertainty, that they played with it as gamblers throw dice. It became cheap, cheaper than the ground in which their bodies were so soon to be laid; and in derision of its cheapness they built great monuments to hold their scattered dust, monuments that should outlast by centuries their latest breath; with light laughter they rode past these chiselled tombs and scorned themselves as the builders of a longevity their own being could never know.

This fact of death is impressing men now.

In proportion as life increases in knowledge; in proportion as men become masters of nature’s forces; in proportion as they measure the universe, make daily incursions therein, and bring back always some conquered thing, some new discovery as a tribute to the limitlessness of mind, in this proportion the unequal brevity and the disintegrating uncertainty of life, lead men to ask with more and more insistence, whether, after all, it is worth while. Is it worth while to carry burdens which force us to look down into the dust of the highway, and not up and out to the wider landscape? Is it worth while to put so much force of soul and spirit, brain and heart into things from which we may be summoned without a moment’s notice? Is it worth while to live, and then go to pieces through the effort at living, live on day after day like a machine out of gear (held together oftentimes only by the surgeon’s skill), then break down completely, give a final sigh and be hurried away to add a lot of useless fragments to the already accumulated scrap heap of the still more useless graveyard?

Into this emphasis of brevity and uncertainty, there enters another element which increasingly raises the question – “Is it worth while?”

That added element is the silence of the grave.

The grave is terribly silent.

You can hear the gravel rattling out of the grave digger’s shovel with a thud upon the coffin lid; or, you can hear the crunching, jarring sound as the casket is slid into its place in the receiving vault, and you can hear the turn of the key and the snap of the bolt as the gate or door of the sepulchre is shut and locked.

You may stand above the simple mound of the churchyard, in front of some monumental shaft, or before the sculptured urn; it may be the dust of a king, a scholar, or some nameless beggar which is heaped within – the silence will be unbroken – except by the sound of your own voice as you ask:

“Where are they? What are they? ARE they?”

Although the sun may be shining in full splendor over row after row of graves, no light will be there in which to read the answer to your questions.

Instead of light there will be thick darkness upon the graves, and gross darkness within.

Men peer into this darkness. There is no vision – no speech – and they ask: “Is it worth while to toil, to labor, to accumulate, to make great advance in knowledge, to build higher every day the conning towers of science, and then leaving these high points of achievement, enter into that realm where no surveyor’s chain has ever measured the extent, where no geographer has ever named a headland, and where the one supreme fact that meets us on the threshold is ignorance – a black, blinding, all-pervading ignorance as to the next moment after death; so that at the end of our reasoning, deduction and amplification, the one thing remaining to the scholar and the fool alike concerning death is a guess, a guess in which the wish of existence is father to the thought, but where the hope of to-morrow is, easily, the despair of to-day.”

With life so brief, so uncertain, and ending in the starless night of silence, men in one form of utterance or another are, in substance, calling to each other and saying, “Let us eat and drink – for to-morrow we die.”

Thus the contemplation of death and its impartial and unprejudiced analysis leads to a belief in materialism and a greater or less surrender to mere sensualism; for, if men cannot go up they will go down; if they cannot live in the spirit, they will grovel in the flesh.