The Churches and Modern Thought: An inquiry into the grounds of unbelief and an appeal for candourPhelips, Vivian
Religion
The Churches and Modern Thought: An inquiry into the grounds of unbelief and an appeal for candour
Phelips, Vivian
Rationalism
In defending the Faith the advanced school of the Church now frankly
admit the difficulties of the old belief, and ask us to accept their
new interpretations of Christianity. The older school of theologians,
the school who can bring themselves neither to assert the truth of
evolution nor to give a decided opinion on the verbal inspiration of
the Bible, are unwillingly, very unwillingly, beginning to follow in
their wake. The views of the two schools being in conflict on many
vital points, it is impossible that they can ever be brought into
agreement. Yet, unless concerted measures are soon taken, confusion
will be worse confounded. To add to the perplexity of the situation,
there are also the various views of the Nonconformists to be taken into
account. Then there are the Scottish Churches, having on the one side
the law-supported minority, standing for an infallible Bible and all
the doctrines of John Calvin; and, on the other, the majority standing
for a form of Christianity which is really Calvinism with a somewhat
unequally-applied veneer of Higher Criticism. Finally there is the
Irish Roman Catholic Church still sunk in the gross superstitions of
the Dark Ages.
The advanced school represent the section which is in close touch
with modern thought, so that their new interpretations of the
Faith constitute the one and only hope of arresting the advance
of agnosticism. On the other hand, the justice of the objections
to these new interpretations is borne out by the circumstance that
many of the older school would no more think of accepting them than
they would of giving up their belief; rather than accept them they
prefer to deny the facts of science. Both sides do violence to their
reason--the enlightened in using the subtleties of their intellect
for interpretations which appear transparently false alike to the
orthodox and to the unbeliever; the obscurantist in denying established
facts. Consider for a moment what all this means. It means that the
modern sceptic has the support of the strictly orthodox when he refutes
the only explanations as yet offered to dispel his doubts. It means
that the validity of the agnostic's objections to these new-fangled
interpretations is fully borne out by the common sense of Christians
themselves, and that a denial of the facts of science and of the
results of Biblical research is the only way we can escape from
unbelief. If a puzzled truth-seeker tried to take a middle course,
he would have to believe that black and white were the same colour,
and his belief would degenerate into an exceedingly unedifying
grey. There is a large proportion of this "grey" belief just now.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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