Religion and the WarYale University. Divinity School
Religion
Religion and the War
Yale University. Divinity School
World War, 1914-1918; World War, 1914-1918 -- Religious aspects
Christians are not at one over the question what, as Christians, they
have a right to hope for. Most evidently is this the case between us
and our enemy. We differ in things hoped for; and it is perhaps not
too much to say that the truth of our hope and the strength of our
hope constitute and measure our spiritual equipment for the winning of
the war. The Germans are fighting for their hope of national expansion
and domination, for their dream of a new world empire of the chosen
and fit people of God. We cannot question the strength of this hope of
theirs, and its powerful influence toward bringing itself to
realization. We and our Allies are resisting these nationalistic and
arrogant hopes, and are appealing to the contrary hope of an inclusive
human brotherhood, in which good will shall prevail between nations,
and hence right and peace. The hope that is truer, more in accordance
with the nature of things, the nature of man, the will of God, and the
hope that is most deeply felt and most loyally served, with most
conviction and most sacrifice, will prevail in the end. That is the
hope that will come true. Ours is inevitably a religious hope, for it
is universal in range, big as the world, and needs not only every
power of ours but the Power not ourselves to bring it about. It is for
every one who holds it intensely, in a real sense, a hope in God and a
hope for God. But is it certain that it is also a Christian hope, a
hope in Christ and a hope for Christ?
There are, not only between us and our enemy, but among ourselves,
radical differences as to what a Christian should hope for in the
present world crisis. There are those who search the Scriptures for
predictions of the Kaiser and his overthrow, and see in the
anti-Christian philosophy and in the anti-Christian arrogance and
cruelty of his militaristic state, a sign that the end of this evil
world-age is near, and that Christ will come quickly and set up his
reign on earth. And there are those to whom such literalism in the use
of Scripture and such externality in the hope for Christ's coming are
intellectually impossible and untrue, and religiously harmful. To them
the meaning of the Bible is to be found in the tendency and spirit of
its teachings, and their hope is for the presence and rule of the
spirit of Christ and the dominance of his principles in the common
life of humanity. This involves a radical difference in the hope of
Christians for a new world, a new human society, and in the ways in
which this hope will affect their motives and efforts. There are also
deep-going differences in regard to the hope for a life after death.
That many are looking eagerly for material, "scientific" proof through
physical communications from the dead, while many, on the other hand,
are feeling that immortality belongs to the race and not to the
individual, and that the sacrifice of the young and the strong finds
its only and sufficient end and justification in the new humanity they
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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