The Christian Faith Under Modern SearchlightsJohnson, William Hallock
Religion
The Christian Faith Under Modern Searchlights
Johnson, William Hallock
Modernism (Christian theology)
If the evolution theory is to cover the whole history of the world and
of man, it must be hospitable to the ideas both of continuity and
progress. An interpretation of evolution so framed would be opposed,
indeed, to the conception of a Creator touching the world only with His
finger-tips, and exhausting His creative power in its initial exercise.
It would be opposed to materialistic monism, as well as to an idealistic
or pantheistic monism which would reduce the evolutionary and historic
process to mere appearance. Evolution in its theistic construction sees
in the lower orders of existence and in the earlier stages of life the
promise, but not the potency, of the higher. It assumes the existence of
a power immanent in the universe and adequate to account for the
appearance of new forces. It can interpret alike the continuity of the
evolutionary process, and the appearance once for all in the
irreversible moments of progress of new forms and forces of life. It
admits the possibility of the appearance of new spiritual forces in the
course of history, and opens a vista of illimitable progress.
No one was more certain than Huxley, when speaking of the relation of
man to the lower animals, that "whether _from_ them or not, he is
assuredly not _of_ them."[87] Man's peculiar endowments, his sense of
law and beauty, his spiritual capacities and aspirations, all of these,
if laws of analogy and causation are to hold, point to a different
dimension of being from that of nature below him. If "man still bears in
his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin,"[88] he bears
in the framework of his mind and moral nature the indelible stamp of his
spiritual origin. His spiritual endowments can find their explanation
only in a spiritual world. They have arisen, not from the lair of the
wild beast, but rather from the bosom of God. No ascertained fact of
science, nor any legitimate or necessary inference from any such fact,
forbids the affirmation of faith, "It is He that hath made us," and "we
are His people."
87: "Man's Place in Nature," p. 87.
88: "Descent of Man," p. 619.
With each advance of science the thoughts of men are disturbed. The
discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo seemed to destroy the foundations
of the Christian, or even the theistic, view of the world; but the
astronomer to-day can see anew God's glory in the heavens and more
impressive evidence of His greatness and majesty. When Newton's laws of
motion displaced the idea that the planets were conveyed about their
orbits by angelic beings, it was feared that atheism was the logical
inference. But Newton himself remained a devout theist, and even
Voltaire, his admirer, was ready
"To follow Newton in that boundless road,
Where nature's lost, and ev'rything but God."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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