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.