Christianity and Problems of To-day: Lectures Delivered Before Lake Forest College on the Foundation of the Late William BrossFinley, John H. (John Huston)
Religion
Christianity and Problems of To-day: Lectures Delivered Before Lake Forest College on the Foundation of the Late William Bross
Finley, John H. (John Huston)
Christianity -- 20th century
What we are faced with to-day is not the destruction of religion
but the change in its form and outlook. The permanent thing in the
Christian religion, the unique thing, is that it has been the attempt
to set forth Jesus of Nazareth. Everything else has been temporal,
but that has been permanent. As men look back over history they see
that many expressions of that loyalty have become antiquated, and
have, without any active hostility on the part of reformers, simply
ceased to be. The human mind has no longer regarded them as adequate.
The study of a doctrine such as the Atonement is the best of all
evidence for the fact. On so great a truth the greatest thinkers of
all times have exercised themselves, and the statements made of the
doctrine have been made in terms intelligible to the men of the age
in which they were made. Books which deal with the subject of the
Atonement are invariably stronger on their historical and critical
than on their constructive sides. It is easy to understand now
the defects of so great and permanent a book as Anselm's _Cur Deus
Homo_, or, leaping over many hundreds of years, to question the
adequacy of the statements of Robertson of Brighton, or of MacLeod
Campbell. Even the greatest writers, when they deal with eternal
truth, the Apostle Paul himself being witness, write in the language
of their time for the men of their time, and are influenced in their
statements by the ideas that are in the air in their time. The truth
itself is a matter of Christian experience, whether it be taught
by the old women of Bedford to John Bunyan, or by the thoroughly
equipped scholar of to-day to a student who has all his senses
exercised to receive the truth. But, while mediæval thought has few
greater names than that of Anselm, _Cur Deus Homo_ is now studied
exactly like Faraday's _Researches_, only as a matter of history.
Human thought has left Anselm behind.
To the trained thinker, of course, this position is the merest
commonplace. The wine of divine truth is ever new, and it has to be
put into new bottles. He does an infinite disservice to faith who
strives to tie it indefinitely to particular statements. The heresy
of yesterday may be the orthodoxy of to-day, and the orthodoxy of
to-day the exhausted formula of to-morrow. The men of this generation
read with amazement the attacks of the sixties on Darwin, attacks
so full of acerbity, so reckless in their bandying of evil charges
and in their ascription of anti-religious motives. And to-day, while
the biologist may still debate the particular issue, we know that
the conception of continuity and development has been of enormous
service in every range of thought. The first debates on the _Origin
of Species_ have given place to a general conception. Einstein,
in the same way, may influence profoundly not only physical but
theological and ethical problems.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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