Theology and the Social Consciousness: A Study of the Relations of the Social Consciousness to Theology (2nd ed.)King, Henry Churchill
Religion
Theology and the Social Consciousness: A Study of the Relations of the Social Consciousness to Theology (2nd ed.)
King, Henry Churchill
Christian sociology; Theology, Doctrinal -- History -- 20th century
The unsatisfactoriness of even so honored a symbol as the Apostles'
Creed, as a permanently adequate statement of Christian faith, must
for similar reasons become increasingly clear in the atmosphere of the
social consciousness. One wonders, as he goes carefully over it, that
so many concrete statements could be made concerning the Christian
religion, which yet are so little ethical. The creed seems almost to
exclude the ethical. It has nothing to say, except by rather distant
implication, of the character of God, of the character of Christ, or
of the character of men. The life of Christ between his birth and his
death are untouched. The considerations that really weigh most with
us--as they did with the apostles--in making us Christians, certainly
do not come here to prominent expression. This whole difference of
atmosphere is the striking fact; and were it not that we instinctively
interpret its phrases in accordance with our modern consciousness, we
should feel the difference much more than we do.
What the previous discussion has called the truly mystical--the
recognition of the whole man, of the entire personality--is coming in
increasingly to correct both the falsely mystical and the falsely
metaphysical. We are arguing now, in harmony with the social
consciousness, from the standpoint of the broadly rational, not from
that of the narrowly intellectual.
II. THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD, AS THE DETERMINING PRINCIPLE IN THEOLOGY
One might reach essentially the same general results from the
influence of the social consciousness, by seeing that, so far as it
deepens for us the meaning of the personal, it will deepen immediately
our conception of the Fatherhood of God--the central and dominating
doctrine in all theology--and so affect all theology. For, with a
change in the conception of God, no doctrine can go wholly untouched.
Every step into a deeper feeling for the personal--and the growth of
the modern social consciousness is undoubtedly a long step in that
direction--deepens necessarily religion and theology. Perhaps the
possible results here can be illustrated in no way better than by
recalling Patterson DuBois' putting of the needed change in the
conception of the proper attitude of a father toward his child. We are
not to say, he writes: "I will conquer that child, no matter what it
may cost him," but we are to say, "I will help that child to conquer
himself, no matter what it may cost me." Now that change in point of
view is a well-nigh perfect illustration of the social consciousness
in a given relation, and it cannot be doubted that it is a true
expression of Christ's thought of the Fatherhood of God; but has it
really dominated through and through our theological statements?
Manifestly, what it means to us that God is Father depends on what we
have come to see in fatherhood. And Principal Fairbairn, in the second
part of his _The Place of Christ in Modern Theology_, has given us a
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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