1939 Theology to-day

It is probable that the outbreak of war will prove to have intensified a sense of divergence between older and younger theologians which, in the latter, was already acute. It is extremely important to recognize the fact of this divergence, and to do what may be possible to mitigate a tension which, in some form, may be inevitable and even wholesome. If the divergence is unrecognized, or if no attempts are made to reach mutual understanding, its results may be a loss of spiritual fellowship, and a lack of balance in both parties.

As a contribution to the ‘appeasement’ which is desirable I am moved to attempt my own diagnosis of the situation, and to offer my own theological confession and apologia. I hope this may lead others, specially of the younger theologians, to do the same. Thus, in the interchange which takes place, we may be brought to a greater measure of mutual appreciation. I am sure the older, among whom I regretfully take my place, have a great deal to learn from the younger; I also think the younger are in danger of losing much, and partly spoiling their own contribution, if they so far fail to appreciate their immediate predecessors as to ignore their aim and totally repudiate their method.

No generalization about the older group would be just to all, and I propose to be shamelessly egoistic, because I am likely to avoid misrepresenting myself and might easily misrepresent others.

Some of our younger friends feel that we who reached our conclusions and settled our methods of thought in the first decade of this century have gone up a blind-alley and are now content to settle down at the end of it. But so far as we had any measure of success in our aim, we must refuse that account of our work. For a blind-alley is a road that leads nowhere, and our road led us and some others to Christ. The difficulty which many of the younger generation find about it is not that it leads nowhere, but that it starts from a place where they are not standing and to which they cannot get. I am reminded of the undergraduate who said to me in 1911 or 1912, after listening to Bishop Gore: ‘I could see that his mind was an awfully jolly merry-go-round, but it never stopped where I was so that I could get on.’

My contemporaries grew up in a stable world. Of course, it was not a Christian world in any adequate sense of the words. But it professed Christianity; it was so far sincere in this that it was troubled at any suggestion that it ignored Christian standards of conduct; and in fact its own ostensible standards were to a great extent a Christian heritage. The great Victorian Agnostics had thought it would be possible to retain Christian ethics while discarding Christian doctrine; and (which is more important) they wished to retain Christian ethics and took it for granted that all men of goodwill wished it also. On the ethical side we could assume acceptance of Christian principles.

Along with this went a most unChristian belief in automatic progress, which was an inheritance from the Rationalists of the eighteenth century. Christian principles provided the standard of life; education and scientific discovery would of themselves produce increasing conformity to that standard. Evil, therefore, was regarded as a survival from a passing age. There was no need for redemption, nor even for God except as the ‘tendency that makes for righteousness’.

That situation constituted our problem. We had to do what we could to persuade people possessed of that outlook to believe that they needed a saviour, and that God is something more than a diffused essence of amiability. We had to do this in face of evidence that already the fabric of life was insecure, though only the more alert were sensitive to that evidence. There was a great industrial upheaval planned for the autumn of 1914 – almost a general strike. During the previous summer, in May or early June, I consulted Bishop Gore about some action in view of it; he replied that he had no hope of doing anything useful because on the one side it was too late to check the upheaval, on the other it was impossible to make the hitherto secure classes attend to their peril; and anyhow we all deserved the judgment that was coming. (It came from without, not from within; but it came.)

We were involved in a sex-war which was already a public nuisance and was developing into a menace. We were on the brink of civil war in Ireland. And nowhere was there enough good sense or goodwill to provide a hope of that give-and-take which was needed for a solution. And the root of this obstinacy was the habit of security. No one would believe that any great evil could threaten society as we knew it. There are still multitudes of people for whom, in spite of all to disturb them, the Victorian or Edwardian outlook is axiomatic. Consequently, the theology arising from and addressed to that outlook still has its appeal and value.

It is futile to utter proclamations or denunciations to such a frame of mind. Moreover, we were of necessity infected by it. We saw, as folk who desired to think like Christians, a little further into the meaning of our world than those who sought no illumination from that faith. We had to lead as many as we could to see life in that light of the knowledge of God, which we had ourselves received. We tried, so to speak, to make a map of the world as seen from the standpoint of Christian faith.

In my own case the preparation for this enterprise was more philosophical than theological. The teacher who most influenced me was Edward Caird. The books to which I owed most in the forming of my general outlook were The World and the Individual by Royce, and Bernard Bosanquet’s two volumes of Gifford Lectures – The Principle of Individuality and Value and The Value and Destiny of the Individual. I never accepted Bosanquet’s ultimate position, and at one time my main concern was to discover what was my point of divergence from one who carried me so far with him. All the time there was in the background the pervasive and increasing influence of Plato – especially of the Republic, Phaedrus, Theaetetus and Sophist.

With such an aim and such an approach I was concerned to lead a few members of a generation which accepted one large part of the Christian heritage to enter also on the rest. In the Preface to Christus Veritas I spoke of the contemporary intellectual atmosphere as ‘dominated by a philosophy which leaves no room for a specific Incarnation. This philosophy,’ I went on, ‘is not materialist or atheist; it is both spiritual and theistic; but the idea of God which it reaches is such as to preclude His ever doing anything in particular in any other sense than that in which He does everything in general. I believe that a very slight touch to the intellectual balance may make the scales incline the other way. Part of the trouble is that theologians have left the field of most general inquiry too largely to non-theological philosophers; they have tended to write either history or detailed discussion of particular doctrines. What is needed is the exposition of the Christian idea of God, life and the world, or, in other words, a Christo-centric metaphysics.’

The two sentences which I have italicized seem very remote to-day. The estimate expressed in the earlier was probably mistaken in 1924, when that sentence was written; it has no relevance to the situation to-day. The later sentence expresses what I believe to be a permanent need and the supreme task of theology; but it is a task of which we now see the impracticability in anything less than many generations.

In the Preface to Doctrine in the Church of England I tried to indicate a sense of the new needs. After mentioning that under the influence of Westcott and Gore most Anglican theology was centred upon the Incarnation, I said: ‘A theology of the Incarnation tends to be a Christo-centric metaphysic. And in all ages there is need for the fresh elaboration of such a scheme of thought or map of life as seen in the light of the revelation in Christ. A theology of Redemption (though, of course, Redemption has its great place in the former) tends rather to sound the prophetic note; it is more ready to admit that much in this evil world is irrational and strictly unintelligible; and it looks to the coming of the Kingdom as a necessary preliminary to the understanding of much that now is. If the security of the nineteenth century, already (1937) shattered in Europe, finally crumbles away in our own country, we shall be pressed more and more towards a theology of Redemption. In this we shall be coming closer to the New Testament.’

Now we turn to the world in which the younger theologians have formed their habits of thought. Christian standards of conduct are challenged as radically as Christian doctrine. Men and women come to maturity with no sense that there is a place for them somewhere in a society resting on secure principles which it regards as Christian. There may be no discoverable place for them at all. Society rests on no ascertainable principles, but is rather in its structure an accidental resultant of blind forces, which are in process of undermining what they have produced. The Christian view of life is not only relegated to the background as unnecessary, but openly repudiated by adherents of a philosophy which is far more obviously effective than Christianity; for if a young man becomes a Communist or Fascist he is told very plainly what to think and do, whereas the Church leaves him with nothing but principles so general as to afford no actual guidance. Meanwhile, the world has been fumbling about with a League of Nations, till its drift to another war became evident, though statesmen declared that this would be the end of civilization.

When the older theologians offer to men fashioned by such influences a Christian map of the world, these rightly refuse to listen. The world of to-day is one of which no Christian map can be made. It must be changed by Christ into something very unlike itself before a Christian map of it is possible. We used to believe in the sovereignty of the God of love a great deal too light-heartedly. I have much more understanding now than I had in 1906 or thereabout (when he said it) of Bishop Gore’s passionate outburst at a meeting of the Synthetic Society: ‘If it were not for the miracles, and supremely the Resurrection, I should see no more reason for supposing that God is revealed in Jesus Christ than that He is revealed in Nero.’

There is a new task for theologians to-day. We cannot come to the men of to-day saying: ‘You will find that all your experience fits together in a harmonious system if you will only look at it in the illumination of the Gospel.’ We may still hope that one day they will look back at their experience and see that all of it falls within the purpose of the God of Righteous Love. But that kind of theology belongs to the Kingdom which is to come. Our task with this world is not to explain it but to convert it. Its need can be met, not by the discovery of its own immanent principle in signal manifestation through Jesus Christ, but only by the shattering impact upon its self-sufficiency and arrogance of the Son of God crucified, risen and ascended, pouring forth that explosive and disruptive energy which is the Holy Ghost. He is the source of fellowship and all true fellowship comes from Him. But in order to fashion true fellowship in such a world as this, and out of such men and women as we are, He must first break up sham fellowships with which we have been deluding ourselves. Christ said that the effect of His coming would be to set men at variance. We must expect the movement of His Spirit among us to produce sharper divisions as well as deeper unity.

All this still falls formally, I think, within the formulations which we reached in the pre-war days, and which were indeed only a rephrasing of traditional Christian positions. In Mens Creatrix (1916) and Christus Veritas (1924) I argued that evil, when overcome, is justified, and that no justification for any one instance of evil is possible until that evil is overcome. I still think that this formally covers the ground. But to the new generation the approach, the tone, the emphasis seem all to be wrong – so wrong that they cannot even be interested in the question whether the formula is valid. War – nothing less – overshadows life. We have to maintain our faith in God under the shadow and shock of war. Facile generalizations are an affront. We must start from the fearful tension between the doctrine of the Love of God and the actual facts of daily experience. When we have eliminated war, it will be time to discuss whether its monstrous evil can then be seen as a ‘constituent element of the absolute good’ (Christus Veritas, p. 254). Till then we had better get on with the job of eliminating it by the power of the Gospel, which we must present, not as the clue to a universal synthesis, but as the source of world-transformation.

Partly for this reason, and still more because of the convergence of all lines of New Testament scholarship upon the central place of the Ecclesia in the Apostolic experience and teaching, theologians of to-day are more concerned than we were … about the theological status of the Church. The Church is part of its own Creed. To be in Christ is to be in the Church – and vice versa. Hence there is a new appreciation of the importance of the Church for faith itself. In the midst of this world where it appears that the devil’s claim is valid – ‘it hath been delivered unto me, and to whomsoever I will I give it’ – the individual Christian is helpless except as a member of the Body, the Church. So the Church, alike as ground and object of faith, and as the agent of the Kingdom endowed even now with its powers, has a new prominence in the minds of thoughtful Christians. We did not fail a quarter of a century ago to insist on the necessity and claim of the Church. But this was secondary and derivative; now it is primary and basic.

Theology to-day, as I think, has two main tasks. They are one at the root, and those engaged on each should be concerned also for the other. But they are very different. First there is the thinking out afresh what are the standards of life to which a society must aim at conforming if it is to be in any sense a Christian society. We lack, and desperately need, an ethic of collective action. What is the duty of a Christian managing-director or of a Christian trade union secretary in an industrial dispute? Neither may act in his own name alone. All the perspectives are different from those of individual relationships. But we offer no guidance whatever. And in the modern world half the decisions that men have to take are on behalf of some collective unit. This problem appears in its acutest form in the pacifist controversy.

In all this field, effective action is possible only if Christians (a) are ready to co-operate with non-Christians who share their aim, (b) are able to present what they believe on Christian grounds to be right as commendable also on general grounds of reason. Here is a field for the utmost co-operative effort in thought and action. The two great Papal Encyclicals Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno, and such writings as those of Maritain, set us an example from the Roman Catholic side. Those of us who, in comparison, are handicapped by inability to accept the Thomist scheme as an assured starting-point, though having nothing which is really so complete and thorough to put in its place, must do our best, even if for a time it makes poor showing beside the achievement of our colleagues. Perhaps one main task is to become clear precisely where and why we dissent from the Thomist basis, and see whether the whole structure may not be susceptible of modification in the light of our different or additional principles. But whether in that way or in some other, we must labour for the rebirth of Christendom.

Behind and beneath all this is the need to recover our apprehension of the Gospel alike in its essence and in its impact upon ourselves and the world. We have to face this tormented world, not as offering a means to its coherence in thought and its harmony in practice, but as challenging it in the name and power of Christ crucified and risen. We shall not try to ‘make sense’ of everything; we shall openly proclaim that most things as they are have no sense in them at all. We shall not say that a Christian philosophy embraces all experience in a coherent and comprehensive scheme; we shall declare that in the Gospel there is offered to men deliverance from a system of things – ‘the world’ – which deserves the destruction which is coming upon it, a deliverance offered to all so that ‘the world’ itself may receive it if it will. We proclaim, not general progress, but salvation to them that believe.

Here at once two problems confront us. First, what is the relation between that Order of Redemption which the Christian enters by faith and the Order of Creation to which he belongs as a man? Here is the pacifist problem again. Is there a Natural Order which is from God, as Catholic tradition holds? Or is there only Natural Disorder, the fruit of sin, from which Christ delivers us, as continental Protestantism has held? And if the latter view be adopted, does the deliverance take effect in this life or only in the life to come?

Secondly, what is that Gospel which we are to proclaim? Or, if we like to put it otherwise, what is the content of Revelation? Are there revealed truths, which can be formulated in propositions? Or is Revelation (as I am led to think) always given in Events? If that is so, there are truths about Revelation, but not actually revealed truths.

We must dig the foundations deeper than we did in pre-war years, or in the inter-war years when we developed our pre-war thoughts. And we must be content with less imposing structures. One day theology will take up again its larger and serener task and offer to a new Christendom its Christian map of life, its Christo-centric metaphysic. But that day can hardly dawn while any who are now already concerned with theology are still alive. The task that claims our labour now is far less alluring to one of my own temperament and upbringing, yet there can be no doubt that in theology as in life we shall be rather enriched than impoverished, even though we are concerned to light beacons in the darkness rather than to illuminate the world, if we are more completely dominated in thought and aspiration by the redeeming acts of God in Jesus Christ.

The article originally appeared in Theology 39 (233): 326–33. The full text can be found at <https://doi.org/10.1177/0040571X3903923302>.