The writer’s sympathies and convictions are entirely with this that
he speaks of as renascent or modern religion; he is neither atheist
nor Buddhist nor Mohammedan nor Christian. He will make no
pretence, therefore, to impartiality and detachment. He will do his
best to be as fair as possible and as candid as possible, but the
reader must reckon with this bias. He has found this faith growing
up in himself; he has found it, or something very difficult to
distinguish from it, growing independently in the minds of men and
women he has met. They have been people of very various origins;
English, Americans, Bengalis, Russians, French, people brought up in
a “Catholic atmosphere,” Positivists, Baptists, Sikhs, Mohammedans.
Their diversity of source is as remarkable as their convergence of
tendency. A miscellany of minds thinking upon parallel lines has
come out to the same light. The new teaching is also traceable in
many professedly Christian religious books and it is to be heard
from Christian pulpits. The phase of definition is manifestly at
hand.
2. MODERN RELIGION HAS A FINITE GOD
Perhaps the most fundamental difference between this new faith and
any recognised form of Christianity is that, knowingly or
unknowingly, it worships A FINITE GOD. Directly the believer is
fairly confronted with the plain questions of the case, the vague
identifications that are still carelessly made with one or all of
the persons of the Trinity dissolve away. He will admit that his
God is neither all-wise, nor all-powerful, nor omnipresent; that he
is neither the maker of heaven nor earth, and that he has little to
identify him with that hereditary God of the Jews who became the
“Father” in the Christian system. On the other hand he will assert
that his God is a god of salvation, that he is a spirit, a person, a
strongly marked and knowable personality, loving, inspiring, and
lovable, who exists or strives to exist in every human soul. He
will be much less certain in his denials that his God has a close
resemblance to the Pauline (as distinguished from the Trinitarian)
“Christ.” …
The modern religious man will almost certainly profess a kind of
universalism; he will assert that whensoever men have called upon
any God and have found fellowship and comfort and courage and that
sense of God within them, that inner light which is the quintessence
of the religious experience, it was the True God that answered them.
For the True God is a generous God, not a jealous God; the very
antithesis of that bickering monopolist who “will have none other
gods but Me”; and when a human heart cries out—to what name it
matters not—for a larger spirit and a stronger help than the
visible things of life can give, straightway the nameless Helper is
with it and the God of Man answers to the call. The True God has no
scorn nor hate for those who have accepted the many-handed symbols
of the Hindu or the lacquered idols of China. Where there is faith,
where there is need, there is the True God ready to clasp the hands
that stretch out seeking for him into the darkness behind the ivory
and gold.
The fact that God is FINITE is one upon which those who think
clearly among the new believers are very insistent. He is, above
everything else, a personality, and to be a personality is to have
characteristics, to be limited by characteristics; he is a Being,
not us but dealing with us and through us, he has an aim and that
means he has a past and future; he is within time and not outside
it. And they point out that this is really what everyone who prays
sincerely to God or gets help from God, feels and believes. Our
practice with God is better than our theory. None of us really pray
to that fantastic, unqualified danse a trois, the Trinity, which the
wranglings and disputes of the worthies of Alexandria and Syria
declared to be God. We pray to one single understanding person.
But so far the tactics of those Trinitarians at Nicaea, who stuck
their fingers in their ears, have prevailed in this world; this was
no matter for discussion, they declared, it was a Holy Mystery full
of magical terror, and few religious people have thought it worth
while to revive these terrors by a definite contradiction. The
truly religious have been content to lapse quietly into the
comparative sanity of an unformulated Arianism, they have left it to
the scoffing Atheist to mock at the patent absurdities of the
official creed. But one magnificent protest against this
theological fantasy must have been the work of a sincerely religious
man, the cold superb humour of that burlesque creed, ascribed, at
first no doubt facetiously and then quite seriously, to Saint
Athanasius the Great, which, by an irony far beyond its original
intention, has become at last the accepted creed of the church.
The long truce in the criticism of Trinitarian theology is drawing
to its end. It is when men most urgently need God that they become
least patient with foolish presentations and dogmas. The new
believers are very definitely set upon a thorough analysis of the
nature and growth of the Christian creeds and ideas. There has
grown up a practice of assuming that, when God is spoken of, the
Hebrew-Christian God of Nicaea is meant. But that God trails with
him a thousand misconceptions and bad associations; his alleged
infinite nature, his jealousy, his strange preferences, his
vindictive Old Testament past. These things do not even make a
caricature of the True God; they compose an altogether different and
antagonistic figure.
It is a very childish and unphilosophical set of impulses that has
led the theologians of nearly every faith to claim infinite
qualities for their deity. One has to remember the poorness of the
mental and moral quality of the churchmen of the third, fourth, and
fifth centuries who saddled Christendom with its characteristic
dogmas, and the extreme poverty and confusion of the circle of ideas
within which they thought. Many of these makers of Christianity,
like Saint Ambrose of Milan (who had even to be baptised after his
election to his bishopric), had been pitchforked into the church
from civil life; they lived in a time of pitiless factions and
personal feuds; they had to conduct their disputations amidst the
struggles of would-be emperors; court eunuchs and favourites swayed
their counsels, and popular rioting clinched their decisions. There
was less freedom of discussion then in the Christian world than
there is at present (1916) in Belgium, and the whole audience of
educated opinion by which a theory could be judged did not equal,
either in numbers or accuracy of information, the present population
of Constantinople. To these conditions we owe the claim that the
Christian God is a magic god, very great medicine in battle, “in hoc
signo vinces,” and the argument so natural to the minds of those
days and so absurd to ours, that since he had ALL power, all
knowledge, and existed for ever and ever, it was no use whatever to
set up any other god against him… .
By the fifth century Christianity had adopted as its fundamental
belief, without which everyone was to be “damned everlastingly,” a
conception of God and of Christ’s relation to God, of which even by
the Christian account of his teaching, Jesus was either totally
unaware or so negligent and careless of the future comfort of his
disciples as scarcely to make mention. The doctrine of the Trinity,
so far as the relationship of the Third Person goes, hangs almost
entirely upon one ambiguous and disputed utterance in St. John’s
gospel (XV. 26). Most of the teachings of Christian orthodoxy
resolve themselves to the attentive student into assertions of the
nature of contradiction and repartee. Someone floats an opinion in
some matter that has been hitherto vague, in regard, for example, to
the sonship of Christ or to the method of his birth. The new
opinion arouses the hostility and alarm of minds unaccustomed to so
definite a statement, and in the zeal of their recoil they fly to a
contrary proposition. The Christians would neither admit that they
worshipped more gods than one because of the Greeks, nor deny the
divinity of Christ because of the Jews. They dreaded to be
polytheistic; equally did they dread the least apparent detraction
from the power and importance of their Saviour. They were forced
into the theory of the Trinity by the necessity of those contrary
assertions, and they had to make it a mystery protected by curses to
save it from a reductio ad absurdam. The entire history of the
growth of the Christian doctrine in those disordered early centuries
is a history of theology by committee; a history of furious
wrangling, of hasty compromises, and still more hasty attempts to
clinch matters by anathema. When the muddle was at its very worst,