Modern Religious Cults and MovementsAtkins, Gaius Glenn
Religion
Modern Religious Cults and Movements
Atkins, Gaius Glenn
Christian Science; New Thought; Religion; Spiritual healing
There are those who view with apprehension the whole future of religion.
They believe that the foundations of the great deep are breaking beneath
us, that Christianity must be profoundly recast before it can go on
prevailingly, and they are reaching in one direction and another for
constructive changes, but all this within the frontiers of historic
Christianity and the Church. They want church unity but they still want
a church; they want a new theology but still a theology; they want new
applications of religion but still substantially the old religion. There
was more of this during the war than just now. Such a book as Orchard's
"Future of Religion," perhaps the most thoughtful analysis of conditions
given us for a long time, was born of the war itself and already many of
its anticipations seem to miss the point. Such expectations of wholesale
religious reconstruction leave out of account the essential conservatism
of human nature, a conservatism more marked in religion than anywhere
else.
There is also a strong and telling group which is seeking so to recast
and interpret inherited faiths as to make them more consonant to modern
needs and more hospitable to new understandings. Such as these have
accepted gladly the tested conclusions of science, the results of
Biblical criticism and the revealing suggestion of both psychology and
philosophy; they have sought to disentangle the essential from the
unessential, the enduring from the transient. They have found in science
not the foe but the friend of religion. Those intimations of unfailing
force, those resolutions of the manifold phases of action and reality
toward which science is reaching have seemed to them a discovery of the
very presence and method of God, and they have found in just such
regions as these new material for their faith. They have dealt
reverently with the old creeds, for they have seen that the forms which
Christianity has taken through the centuries have grown out of enduring
experiences and needs never to be outgrown, and that their finality is
the finality of the deep things of the soul itself. They have been able,
therefore, to make new truth tributary to old faith and to interpret the
central affirmations of Christianity in terms of present-day facts. They
have sought to share their conclusions with others and they have really
been able to carry Christianity through the transitional period of the
last fifty years and continue it open-minded, strongly established,
reverent and enriched rather than impoverished.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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