Religion and Theology: A Sermon for the Times: Preached in the Parish Church of Crathie, fifth September and in the College Church, St AndrewsTulloch, John
Religion
Religion and Theology: A Sermon for the Times: Preached in the Parish Church of Crathie, fifth September and in the College Church, St Andrews
Tulloch, John
Bible. Corinthians, 2nd, XI, 3 -- Sermons; Sermons, English -- 19th century
All this sameness in diversity disappears when we turn to theology.
The differences in this case are radical. They are not diversities of
gifts with the same spirit, but fundamental antagonisms of thought. As
some men are said to be born Platonists, and some Aristotelians, so
some are born Augustinians, and some Pelagians or Arminians. These
names have been strangely identified with true or false views of
Christianity. What they really denote is diverse modes of Christian
thinking, diverse tendencies of the Christian intellect, which repeat
themselves by a law of nature. It is no more possible to make men
think alike in theology than in anything else where the facts are
complicated and the conclusions necessarily fallible. The history of
theology is a history of "variations;" not indeed, as some have
maintained, without an inner principle of movement, but with a
constant repetition of oppositions underlying its necessary
development. The same, contrasts continually appear throughout its
course, and seem never to wear themselves out. From the beginning
there has always been the broader and the narrower type of thought--a
St Paul and St John, as well as a St Peter and St James; the doctrine
which leans to the works, and the doctrine which leans to grace; the
milder and the severer interpretations of human nature and of the
divine dealings with it--a Clement of Alexandria, an Origen and a
Chrysostom, as well as a Tertullian, an Augustine, and a Cyril of
Alexandria, an Erasmus no less than a Luther, a Castalio as well as a
Calvin, a Frederick Robertson as well as a John Newman. Look at these
men and many others equally significant on the spiritual side as they
look to God, or as they work for men, how much do they resemble one
another! The same divine life stirs in them all. Who will undertake to
settle which is the truer Christian? But look at them on the
intellectual side and they are hopelessly disunited. They lead rival
forces in the march of Christian thought--forces which may yet find a
point of conciliation, and which may not be so widely opposed as they
seem, but whose present attitude is one of obvious hostility. Men may
meet in common worship and in common work, and find themselves at one.
The same faith may breathe in their prayers, and the same love fire
their hearts. But men who think can never be at one in their thoughts
on the great subjects of the Christian revelation. They may own the
same Lord, and recognise and reverence the same types of Christian
character, but they will differ so soon as they begin to define their
notions of the Divine, and draw conclusions from the researches either
of ancient or of modern theology. Of all the false dreams that have
ever haunted humanity, none is more false than the dream of catholic
unity in this sense. It vanishes in the very effort to grasp it, and
the old fissures appear within the most carefully compacted structures
of dogma.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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