Protestant Christianity in America is, unfortunately, unduly dependent upon the very culture of modernity, the disintegration of which would offer a more independent religion a unique opportunity. Confused and tormented by cataclysmic events in contemporary history, the "modern mind" faces the disintegration of its civilization in alternate moods and hope, of faith and despair. The culture of modernity was the artifact of modern civilization, product of its unique and characteristic conditions, and it is therefore not surprising that its minarets of the spirit should fall when the material foundations of its civilization begin to crumble. Its optimism had no more solid foundation than the expansive mood of the era of triumphant capitalism and naturally gives way to confusion and despair when the material conditions of life are seriously altered. Therefore the lights in its towers are extinguished at the very moment when light is needed to survey the havoc wrought in the city and the plan of rebuilding.

At such a time a faith which claims to have a light, "the same yesterday, today, and forever," might conceivably become a source of illumination to its age so sadly in need of clues to the meaning of life and the logic of contemporary history. The Christian churches are, unfortunately, not able to offer the needed guidance and insight. The orthodox churches have long since compounded the truth of the Christian religion with dogmatisms of another day, and have thereby petrified what would otherwise have long since fallen prey to the beneficent dissolutions of the processes of nature and history. The liberal churches, on the other hand, have hid their light under the bushel of the culture of modernity with all its short-lived prejudices and presumptuous certainties.

To be more specific: Orthodox Christianity, with insights and perspectives, in many ways superior to those of liberalism, cannot come to the aid of modern man, partly because its religious truths are still imbedded in an outmoded science and partly because its morality is expressed in dogmatic and authoritarian moral codes. It tries vainly to meet the social perplexities of a complex civilization with irrelevant precepts, deriving their authority from their — sometimes quite fortuitous — inclusion in a sacred canon. It concerns itself with the violation of Sabbatarian prohibitions or puritanical precepts, and insists, figuratively, on tithing "mint, anise, and cummin," preserving the minutiae of social and moral standards which may once have had legitimate or accidental sanctity, but which have, whether legitimate or accidental, now lost both religious and moral meaning.

The religion and ethics of the liberal church is dominated by the desire to prove to its generation that it does not share the anachronistic ethics or believe the incredible myths of orthodox religion. Its energy for some decades has been devoted to the task of proving religion and science compatible, a purpose which it has sought to fulfill by disavowing the more incredible portion of its religious heritage and clothing the remainder in terms acceptable to the "modern mind." It has discovered rather belatedly that this same modern mind, which only yesterday seemed to be the final arbiter of truth, beauty, and goodness, is in a sad state of confusion today, amidst the debris of the shattered temple of its dreams and hopes. In adjusting itself to the characteristic credos and prejudices of modernity, the liberal church has been in constant danger of obscuring what is distinctive in the Christian message and creative in Christian morality. Sometimes it fell to the level of merely clothing the naturalistic philosophy and the utilitarian ethics of modernity with pious phrases.

The distinctive contribution of religion to morality lies in its comprehension of the dimension of depth in life. A secular moral act resolves the conflicts of interest and passion, revealed in any immediate situation, by whatever counsels a decent prudence may suggest, the most usual counsel being that of moderation — "in nothing too much." A religious morality is constrained by its sense of a dimension of depth to trace every force with which it deals to some ultimate origin and to relate every purpose to some ultimate end. It is concerned not only with immediate values and disvalues, but with the problem of good and evil, not only with immediate objectives, but with ultimate hopes. It is troubled by the question of the primal "whence" and the final "wherefore." It is troubled by these questions because religion is concerned with life and existence as a unity and coherence of meaning. In so far as it is impossible to live at all without presupposing a meaningful existence, the life of every person is religious, with the possible exception of the rare skeptic who is more devoted to the observation of life than to living it, and whose interest in detailed facts is more engrossing than his concern for ultimate meaning and coherence. Even such persons have usually constructed a little cosmos in a world which they regard as chaos and derive vitality and direction from their faith in the organizing purpose of this cosmos.

High religion is distinguished from the religion of both primitives and ultra-moderns by its effort to bring the whole of reality and existence into some system of coherence. The primitives, on the other hand, are satisfied by some limited cosmos, and the moderns by a superficial one. For primitive man the unity of the tribe or the majesty and mystery of some natural force — the sun, the moon, the mountain, or the generative process — may be the sacred center of a meaningful existence. For modern man the observable sequences of natural law or the supposedly increasing values of human cooperation are sufficient to establish a sense of spiritual security and to banish the fear of chaos and meaninglessness which has beset the human spirit throughout the ages.

This straining after an ultimate coherence inevitably drives high religion into depth as well as breadth; for the forms of life are too various and multifarious to be ascribed easily to a single source or related to a single realm of meaning if the source does not transcend all the observable facts and forces, and the realm does not include more than the history of the concrete world. The problem of evil and incoherence cannot be solved on the plane on which the incompatible forces and incommensurate realities (thought and extension, man and nature, spirit and matter) remain in stubborn conflict or rational incompatibility. Since all life is dynamic, religious faith seeks for the solution of the problem of evil by centering its gaze upon the beginning and the end of this dynamic process, upon God the creator and God the fulfillment of existence. Invariably it identifies the origin and source with the goal and end as belonging to the same realm of reality, a proposition which involves religion in many rational difficulties but remains, nevertheless, a perennial and necessary affirmation.

High religions are thus distingushed by the extent of the unity and coherence of life which they seek to encompass and the sense of a transcendent source of meaning by which alone confidence in the meaningfulness of life and existence can be maintained. The dimension of depth in religion is not created simply by the effort to solve the problem of unity in the total breadth of life. The dimension of depth is really prior to any experience of breadth; for the assumption that life is meaningful and that its meaning transcends the observable facts of existence is involved in all achievements of knowledge by which life in its richness and contradictoriness is apprehended. Yet the effort to establish coherence and meaning in terms of breadth increases the sense of depth. Thus the God of a primitive tribe is conceived as the transcendent source of its life; and faith in such a God expresses the sense of the unity and value of tribal solidarity. But when experience forces an awakening culture to fit the life of other peoples into its world, it conceives of a God who transcends the life of one people so completely as no longer to be bound to it. Thus a prophet Amos arises to declare, "Are ye not as the children of the Ethiopians unto me sayeth the Lord." What is divided, incompatible, and conflicting, on the plane of concrete history is felt to be united, harmonious, and akin in its common source ("God hath made of one blood all the nations of men") and its common destiny ("In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free").

The dimension of depth in the consciousness of religion creates the tension between what is and what ought to be. It bends the bow from which every arrow of moral action flies. Every truly moral act seeks to establish what ought to be, because the agent feels obligated to the ideal, though historically unrealized, as being the order of life in its more essential reality. Thus the Christian believes that the ideal of love is real in the will and nature of God, even though he knows of no place in history where the ideal has been realized in its pure form. And it is because it has this reality that he feels the pull of obligation. The sense of obligation in morals from which Kant tried to derive the whole structure of religion is really derived from the religion itself. The "pull" or "drive" of moral life is a part of the religious tension of life. Man seeks to realize in history what he conceives to be already the truest reality — that is, its final essence.

The ethical fruitfulness of various types of religion is determined by the quality of their tension between the historical and the transcendent. This quality is measured by two considerations: The degree to which the transcendent truly transcends every value and achievement of history, so that no relative value of historical achievement may become the basis of moral complacency; and the degree to which the transcendent remains in organic contact with the historical, so that no degree of tension may rob the historical of its significance.

The weakness of orthodox Christianity lies in its premature identification of the transcendent will of God with canonical moral codes, many of which are merely primitive social standards, and for development of its myths into a bad science. The perennial tendency of religion to identify God with the symbols of God in history, symbols which were once filled with a sanctity, of which the stream of new events and conditions has robbed them, is a perpetual source of immorality in religion. The failure of liberal Christianity is derived from its inclination to invest the relative moral standards of a commercial age with ultimate sanctity by falsely casting the aura of the absolute and transcendent ethic of Jesus upon them. A religion which capitulates to the prejudices of a contemporary age is not very superior to a religion which remains enslaved to the partial and relative insights of an age already dead. In each case religion fails because it prematurely resolves moral tension by discovering, or claiming to have realized, the summum bonum in some immediate and relative value of history. The whole of modern secular liberal culture, to which liberal Christianity is unduly bound, is really a devitalized and secularized religion in which the presuppositions of a Christian tradition have been rationalized and read into the processes of history and nature, supposedly discovered by objective science. The original tension of Christian morality is thereby destroyed; for the transcendent ideals of Christian morality have become immanent possibilities in the historic process. Democracy, mutual cooperation, the League of Nations, international trade reciprocity, and other similar conceptions are regarded as the ultimate ideals of the human spirit. None of them are without some degree of absolute validity, but modern culture never discovered to what degree they had emerged out of the peculiar conditions and necessities of a commercial civilization and were intimately related to the interests of the classes which have profited most by the expansion of commerce and industry in recent decades. The transcendent impossibilities of the Christian ethic of love became, in modern culture, the immanent and imminent possibilities of an historical process; and the moral complacence of a generation is thereby supported rather than challenged. This is the invariable consequence of any culture in which no "windows are left open to heaven" and the experience of depth in life is completely dissipated by a confident striving along the horizontal line of the immediate stream of history.

The accommodation of the modern church to a secular culture was so necessary that its occasional capitulation can be understood sympathetically, however baneful the consequences may have been. Medieval Christianity had resisted the advance of science and supported a dying feudal order against the rebellion of a rationalistic morality. The limitations of traditional religion were so great and the achievements of modern science so impressive that it seemed the better part of wisdom to relate the Christian enterprise as intimately as possible with the latter. Whatever its weaknesses, this strategy served at least one good purpose in emancipating Christianity from dogmatic and literalistic interpretations of its mythical inheritance. The genius of religions myth at its best is that it is trans-scientific. Its peril is to express itself in pre-scientific concepts and insist on their literal truth. If liberal religion had not admitted science (in the form of a critico-historical analysis of its sources) into the very heart of the church it would have been impossible to free what is eternal in the Christian religion from the shell of an outmoded culture in which it had become imbedded.

Nevertheless, the loss suffered by liberal Christianity's too uncritical accommodation to modern culture was very great. Its extent is only now becoming apparent when the culture, which had discredited religion because its literally interpreted myths resulted in a bad science, is being in turn discredited because the unrevised philosophical implications of a mere scientific description of historic facts result in a thin and superficial religion. The mythical symbols of transcendence in profound religion are easily corrupted into scientifically untrue statements of historic fact. But the scientific description of historic sequences may be as easily corrupted into an untrue conception of total reality. It is the genius of true myth to suggest the dimension of depth in reality and to point to a realm of essence which transcends the surface of history, on which the cause-effect sequences, discovered and analyzed by science, occur. Science can only deal with this surface of nature and history, analyzing, dividing, and segregating its detailed phenomena and, relating them to each other in terms of their observable sequences. In its effort to bring coherence into its world it can escape the error of a too mechanistic view of reality only with the greatest difficulty and at the price of philosophical corrections of philosophical assumptions unconsciously implied in its method. It is bound to treat each new emergent in history as having its adequate cause in an antecedent event in history, thus committing the logical fallacy, Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

The religious myth, on the other hand, points to the ultimate ground of existence and its ultimate fulfillment. Therefore the great religious myths deal with creation and redemption. But since myth cannot speak of the trans-historical without using symbols and events in history as its forms of expression, it invariably falsifies the facts of history, as seen by science, to state its truth. Religion must therefore make the confession of St. Paul its own: "As deceivers and yet true" (II Cor. 6:8). If in addition religion should insist that its mythical devices have a sacred authority which may defy the conclusions at which science arrives through its observations, religion is betrayed into deception without truth.

Philosophy is, in a sense, a mediator between science and religion. It seeks to bring the religious myth into terms of rational coherence, with all the detailed phenomena of existence which science discloses. Bertrand Russel*s indictment of metaphysics as covert theology remains true even if the modern metaphysician seeks to dispense with religious presuppositions and to act as a coordinator of the sciences. He cannot relate all the detailed facts revealed by science into a total scheme of coherence without presuppositions which are not suggested by the scientific description of the facts, but which are consciously or unconsciously introduced by a religiously grounded world-view.

If theology is an effort to construct a rational and systematic view of life out of the various and sometimes contradictory myths which are associated with a single religious tradition, philosophy carries the process one step farther by seeking to dispense with the mythical basis altogether and resting its world view entirely upon the ground of rational consistency. Thus for Hegel, religion is no more than primitive philosophy in terms of crude picture-thinking, which a more advanced rationality refines. This rationalization of myth is indeed inevitable and necessary, lest religion be destroyed by undisciplined and fantastic imagery or primitive and inconsistent myth. Faith must feed on reason. (Unamuno.) But reason must also feed on faith. Every authentic religious myth contains paradoxes of the relation between the finite and the eternal which cannot be completely rationalized without destroying the genius of true religion. Metaphysics is therefore more dependent upon, and more perilous to, the truth in the original religious myth than is understood in a rationalistic and scientific culture,¹

It was apparent neither to modern culture nor to modern Christianity that the unconscious moral and religious complacence of the bourgeois soul was as influential in discrediting religious myth as the scientific criticism of religious mythology. Modern culture is compounded of the genuine achievements of science and the peculiar ethos of a commercial civilization. The superficialities of the latter, its complacent optimism, its loss of the sense of depth and of the knowledge of good and evil (the heights of good and the depths of evil) were at least as influential in it if not more influential than the discoveries of science. Therefore the adjustment of modern religion to the "mind" of modern culture inevitably involved capitulation to its thin "soul." Liberal Christianity, in adjusting itself to the ethos of this age, therefore sacrificed its most characteristic religious and Christian heritage by destroying the sense of depth and the experience of tension, typical of profound religion. Its Kingdom of God was translated to mean exactly that ideal society which modern culture hoped to realize through the evolutionary process. Democracy and the League of Nations were to be the political forms of this ideal. The Christian ideal of love became the counsel of prudential mutuality so dear and necessary to a complex commercial civilization. The Christ of Christian orthodoxy, true mythical symbol of both the possibilities and the limits of the human, became the good man of Galilee, symbol of human goodness and human possibilities without suggestion of the limits of the human and the temporal — in short, without the suggestion of transcendence.

Failure to recognize the heights led modern Christianity to an equal blindness toward the darker depths of life. The "sin" of Christian orthodoxy was translated into the imperfections of ignorance, which an adequate pedagogy would soon overcome. Hence the difference between a Christian education, teaching the religious ideal of love, and a secular education intent upon enlarging social imagination, became imperceptible. There has been little suggestion in modern culture of the demonic force in human life, of the peril in which all achievements of life and civilization constantly stand because the evil impulses in men may be compounded in collective actions until they reach diabolical proportions; or of the dark and turgid impulses, imbedded in the unconscious of the individual and defying and mocking his conscious control and his rational moral pretensions Modern culture, both Christian and secular, was optimistic enough to believe that all the forces which determine each moral and social situation were fully known and completely understood, and that the forces of reason had successfully chained all demonic powers.

It is by faith in transcendence that a profound religion is saved from complete capitulation to the culture of any age, past or present. When modern Christianity, confused by the prestige of science, the temper of a this-worldly age and the disrepute of orthodox dogmatism, sought to come to terms with current naturalism, it lost the power to penetrate into the ethical aberrations and confusions of a naturalistic culture and to correct its superficiality and false optimism.

It is significant for the history of modern Christianity that the more realistic portion of the church which recognizes the weaknesses and limitations of a liberal culture, inclines to substitute a radical Marxian world view for the discarded liberal one. That disillusionment over the weaknesses of liberalism should lead Christian radicalism to substitute Marxian catastrophism for liberal optimism is in itself commendable. However, the tendency in America is for Christian radicalism to be dissolved in Marxian radicalism. This tendency is particularly strong in America because the morally vigorous section of the Church in this country has been secularized by modern culture to a much larger degree than in any other Western nations. American Protestantism is superficially more influential than the Church in other nations, but its roots are not so deep in the traditions of historic Christianity. It is consequently more prone to a premature disavowal of the characteristic concepts and the moral and religious tension of historic Christianity.

The attachment of radical Christianity to Marxian viewpoints, even though on occasion unqualified, represents a gain in religious as well as moral realism. But Marxism is as naturalistic as modern liberalism. It is therefore deficient in an ultimate perspective upon historic and relative moral achievements. It is as prone to identify the characteristic attitudes and values of the workers with the absolute truth as is liberalism to identify the bourgeois perspectives with eternal values. Both liberalism and Marxism are secularized and naturalized versions of the Hebrew prophetic movement and the Christian religion. But Marxism is a purer derivative of the prophetic movement. Its materialism is "dialectic" rather than mechanistic; and the dialectic (i.e., the logic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis) is much truer to the complex facts of history than the simple evolutionary process of liberal naturalism. It has a better understanding of the depths of evil which reveal themselves in human history, and hence its philosophy of history contains a catastrophism, completely foreign to the dominant mood of modern culture, but closely related to the catastrophism of Jewish prophecy ("The day of the Lord will be darkness and not light," declared the prophet Amos). In common with apocalyptic religion it transmutes an immediate pessimism into an ultimate optimism by its hope in the final establishment of an ideal social order through a miracle of history. In the case of Marxism the proletariat is the active agent of this consummation; yet its success would be impossible without the activity of God, who casts the mighty from their seats and exalts them of low degree. Since Marxism is a secularized religion the divine activity takes the form of a logic of history which preordains that the mighty shall destroy themselves and shall give political strength to the weak in their very effort to destroy them. (This Marxian conception is incidentally the fruit of both a profound religious feeling and of astute social observations. The paradoxes of high religion are in it and the actual facts of history substantiate it to a considerable degree.)

The weakness of the Marxian apocalypse is that its naturalism betrays it into utopian fantasies. Whenever naturalism appropriates the mythical symbols in religion of the unconditioned and transcendent, to make them goals in time and history, it falsely expects the realization of an absolute ideal in the relative temporal process. The anarchistic millennium of Marxism, where each will give according to his ability and take according to his need, in which all social conflicts will be finally resolved and all human needs satisfied, is the perfect product of a naturalistic religion which tries vainly to domesticate the eternal and absolute and to fit the vision of perfection into the inevitable imperfections of history.

Utopianism must inevitably lead to disillusionment. Naturalistic apocalypse is unable to maintain the moral tension which it has created. It has no means of discovering that its visions and dreams are relative to partial interests and temporary perspectives and that even the universal element in them will lose its universality and unqualifiedness when it is made concrete in history. Moral tension thus degenerates into moral complacency when the relative historical achievement is accepted as the ideal. Both liberal and radical naturalism have moral beauty when they are waiting for their "word" to "become flesh," but they are betrayed into lethargy and hypocrisy after the incarnation.

This spiritual decay is a matter of historical record in liberal bourgeois culture. It can be gauged with historical precision by comparing the dreams of the Age of Reason, of a Godwin, a Diderot, a Rousseau, or even an Adam Smith with the pathetic inanities by which twentieth-century idealists seek to give spiritual dignity to the sorry realities of a brutal capitalistic civilization. A perfect symbol of the contrast in an abbreviated span of history is found in the Wilson who conceived the vision of a warless world and a League of Nations and the Wilson who tried to make himself believe that the treaty of Versailles approximated his ideals.

Radical spirituality has the present advantage of still living In the pre- rather than post-apocalypse period of its ideals. Only in Russia, where the ideal has become history, can one observe the beginning of this decay, though the years are too brief to assess it truly. The difference between Lenin's complete sincerity and Stalin's cynical statecraft establishes the tangent which, one may confidently predict, history will further elaborate. Another aspect of the same contrast is Trotsky's fierce enthusiasm for a world revolution and Stalin's prudent contraction of the revolutionary ideal so that it may be compounded with Russian patriotism and harnessed to specifically Russian political and economic tasks. Perhaps Stalin is related to Trotsky as was Napoleon to Rousseau.

A Christianity which leans unduly on or borrows excessively from naturalistic idealism, whether liberal or radical, is really betrayed into dependence upon corruptions of its own ethos and culture. The significance of Hebrew-Christian religion lies in the fact that the tension between the ideal and the real which it creates can be maintained at any point in history, no matter what the moral and social achievement, because its ultimate ideal always transcends every historical fact and reality.

It is significant for the character of Western spirituality that it is tempted to destroy religious tension by losing the transcendent in the historical process and not, as in Eastern religion, by making the transcendent irrelevant to the historical process. Modern naturalism, whether liberal or radical, is a secularized version of the naturalistic element in historic Hebrew-Christian mythology. It is important to recognize that the God of Hebrew and Christian faith is the creator of the world, as well as its judge, and that according to this faith the ultimate meaning of life is both revealed in and corrupted by the temporal process. While the temper of the Western World tends to dissolve the paradoxical dialectic of this faith in the direction of a naturalism which dissipates the element of perpetual transcendence, it is important to remember that the spiritual and moral loss is just as great if reaction to naturalism drives Christianity into an other-worldly dualism in which the transcendent ceases to have relevance to the historical and temporal process.

If we are to mark out the true dimensions of an independent Christian ethic we must, therefore, be as careful to disassociate it from idealistic dualisms as from naturalistic monisms. The determining characteristic of all dualistic religion is that in its effort to escape the relativity of the temporal and material it finds escape in some rational or eternal absolute, in a realm of the supernatural which ceases to be the ground of the natural, but is only the ultimate abyss of the natural where all distinctions vanish and all dynamic processes cease.

Soderblom divides all higher religions into religions of culture and religions of revelation, placing Christianity and Judaism alone (and possibly Zoroastrianism) in the latter category.² The distinguishing mark of culture religions is that they seek by some rational or mystical discipline to penetrate to the eternal forms which transcend temporal reality. The distinctive feature of a religion of revelation (also defined as prophetic religion) is that "its contrast is not that of spirit versus bodily form, but rather that of Creator above the created, the living jealous God above every image or likeness."³ The myth of creation offers, in other words the firm foundation for a world view which sees the Transcendent involved in, but not identified with, the process of history. It is important to realize that the myth of creation is only the basis of this dialectic and that its further elaboration results in the prophetic or apocalyptic characteristic of this religion, marked by its hope for an ultimate fulfillment of meaning and its faith that the God who is the ground of existence is also the guarantor of its fulfillment. In making practically the same distinction and contrast as that of Soderblom, John Oman declares "the term apocalyptic is used in contrast to the mystic and means any religion which looks for an unveiling of the supernatural in the natural."⁴

Perhaps the distinction between the two types of religion could be most accurately expressed by the terms "mystical" and "mythical." The "religions of culture" of Soderblom's category are ultimately mystical though immediately rational. They begin by a rational quest after the eternal forms within the passing flux. But rational observation turns into mystical contemplation as it strains after the final vision of the absolute and eternal. The eternal forms which give body to temporal reality finally become disassociated from it; and the eternal becomes an undifferentiated transcendence, "a fathomless depth in which no distinctions are visible or a fullness of being that exceeds our comprehension."⁵ The ultimate consequence of this method of apprehending the absolute may be seen in Buddhism most clearly; but every mystical religion portrays the tendencies. The mystical is the rational in its final effort to transcend the temporal, an effort which forces it to transcend even the rational. The mystical carries the rational passion for unity and coherence to the point where the eye turns from the outward scene, with its recalcitrant facts and stubborn variety, to the inner world of spirit, where the unity of self-consciousness becomes the symbol of, and the means of reaching, the Absolute, a type of reality which is "beyond existence," "a mysterious silent stillness which dissolves consciousness and form" (Hierotheus). Thus religion, seeking after the final source of life's meaning and its organizing center, ends by destroying the meaning of life. Historic and concrete existence is robbed of its meaning because its temporal and relative forms are believed not worthy to be compared with the Absolute; but the Absolute is also bereft of meaning because it transcends every form and category of concrete existence. Mysticism is really a self-devouring rationalsm which begins by abstracting rational forms from concrete reality and ends by positing an ultimate reality beyond all rational forms.

It must not be assumed that rationalism must always end in mysticism. The idealistic monism of the Western World, from Plato to Hegel, represents the effort of a more sober type of rationalism to comprehend the unity of the world within the living flux of history. As far as it succeeds in doing this it results in the optimistic identification of the Absolute with the totality of things, a conclusion at variance with tragic realities of existence and detrimental to high moral passion. While the Western World has, on the whole, tended to satisfy the rationalistic yearning after the ultimate unity with philosophical monisms, which complicate the problem of evil, the Oriental world (perhaps because it is older, and wiser or because it is more disillusioned) has chosen the more dualistic and pessimistic alternative and has found its ultimate unity and center of meaning only after fleeing the temporal world completely. Even in the Western World, noticeably in Christian mysticism, the robust but also romantic optimism of monistic philosophy is easily transmuted into a pessimistic other-worldliness The road from Plato to Plotinus and Neo-Platonism marks this path.

Whether rationalistic religion tends toward the optimism of philosophical monism or the pessimism of dualistic mysticism, it is an essentially aristocratic religion, unavailable for the burden-bearers of the world. These cannot indulge in the luxury of the contemplative withdrawal from the world which such religion requires; nor does the curious mixture of beauty and tragedy revealed and enacted in their lives permit them to harbor the illusions of either pure pessimism or pure optimism.

While Christianity has been partly formed and certainly influenced by rational and mystical religions, it owes its primary basis to a mythical rather than a mystical religious heritage — that of the Hebrew prophetic movement. Myths are not peculiar to Hebrew religion. They are to be found in the childhood of every culture when the human imagination plays freely upon the rich variety of facts and events in life and history, and seeks to discover their relation to basic causes and ultimate meanings without a careful examination of their relation to each other in the realm of natural causation. In this sense mythical thinking is simply pre-scientific thinking, which has not learned to analyze the relation of things to each other before fitting them into its picture of the whole. Perhaps the simplest mythical thought is the animistic thought of the primitives in which each phenomenon of the natural world is related to a quasi-conscious or quasi-spiritual causal force with little or no understanding of the web of cause-effect relationships in the natural world itself. But mythical thought is not only pre-scientific; it is also supra-scientific. It deals with vertical aspects of reality which transcend the horizontal relationships which science analyzes, charts and records. The classical myth refers to the transcendent source and end of existence without abstracting it from existence.

In this sense the myth alone is capable of picturing the world as a realm of coherence and meaning without defying the facts of incoherence. Its world is coherent because all facts in it are related to some central source of meaning; but is not rationally coherent because the myth is not under the abortive necessity of relating all things to each other in terms of immediate rational unity. The God of mythical religion is, significantly, the Creator and not the First Cause. If he were first cause (a rational conception) he would be either one of the many observable causes in the stream of things, in which case God and the world are one; or he would be the unmoved mover, in which case his relation to the world is not a vital or truly creative one. To say that God is the creator is to use an image which transcends the canons of rationality, but which expresses both his organic relation to the world and his distinction from the world. To believe that God created the world is to feel that the world is a realm of meaning and coherence without insisting that the world is totally good or that the totality of things must be identified with the Sacred. The myth of the creator God is basic to Hebraic religion. The significant achievement of the prophetic movement in Hebraic religion is that it was able to purge its religion of the parochial and puerile weaknesses of its childhood without rationalizing it and thus destroying the virtue of its myth. The purifying process in Hebraic religion through which it arrived at a pure monotheism was dominated by an ethico-religious passion rather than a rational urge for consistency. It therefore increased the width and extent of its meaningful world until it included the whole of existence without destroying the sense of depth and transcendence. In this dimension of depth it had room for evil without attributing it to either God or to the material world. In the myth of the fall, the origin of sin is not made identical with the genesis of life. It is therefore not synonymous with creation, either in the sense that God ordained it or that it is the inevitable consequence of the incarnation of spirit in matter and nature. Hebrew spirituality was, consequently, never corrupted by either the optimism which conceived the world as possessing unqualified sanctity and goodness or the pessimism which relegated historic existence to a realm of meaningless cycles. The existence of evil was, on the one hand, a mystery, and was, on the other hand (perhaps too unqualifiedly), attributed to human perversity. The myth of the fall makes the latter explanation too unqualifiedly in the sense that it derives all the inadequacies of nature from man's disobedience, a rather too sweeping acceptance of human responsibility for nature*s ruthlessness and for the brevity and mortality of natural life.

The mythical basis of the Hebraic world view enables Hebraic spirituality to enjoy the pleasures of this life without becoming engrossed in them, and to affirm the significance of human history without undue reverence for the merely human. In the Hebraic world both nature and history glorify the Creator: "The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork," and "O Lord, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all. The earth is full of thy riches." Such sentiments abound in the devotional literature of the Jews. The second Isaiah, whose prophetic insghts lift Hebraic religion to its sublimest heights, finds the majesty of God in both his creative nearness to and his distance from the created world. God speaks to him as follows: "I am the Lord and there is none else. I make the peace and create evil. I the Lord do all these things. Woe unto him who strivest with his maker. Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, What makest thou? — Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself, O God of Israel the Saviour (Isa. 45). Or again, "It is he that sitteth on the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in" (Isa. 4O). In these sublime mythical conceptions God is revealed in the creation because he is the creator, but he also transcends the world as the creator and his transcendence reaches to a height where it defies comprehension (Thou art a God that hidest thyself).

The myth of the Creator God offers the possibilities for a prophetic religion in which the transcendent God becomes both the judge and the redeemer of the world. This possibility is, however, not an inevitability. It is always possible that a mythical religion become unduly centered in the myth of Genesis, thus glorifying the given world as sacred without subjecting its imperfections to the judgment of the Holy. In this case the result is a religion of sacramentalism rather than of prophecy. The sacramentalism of Christian orthodoxy, in which all natural things are symbols and images of the divine transcendence, but in which the tension between the present and the future of prophetic religion is destroyed, is a priestly deflation of prophetic religion. In genuinely prophetic religion the God who transcends the created world also convicts a sinful world of its iniquities and promises an ultimate redemption from them. The realm of redemption is never, as in rational and mystical religion, above the realm of living history, but within and at the end of it. The insistence of the Hebrew upon the sacred meaning of this life (the soul resides significantly in the blood in Hebrew mythology) is the root of all modern naturalisms, liberal and radical; though in the original Hebraic mythical view the processes of nature and history are never self-sufficient, self-explanatory, and self-redeeming. God will redeem history (that is the mythical emphasis in contrast to naturalism) but it is the living world in its history which will be redeemed (that is the mythical emphasis in contrast to the otherworldliness of rational-mystical religion).

The prophetic movement in Hebraic religion offers an interesting confirmation of the thesis that a genuine faith in transcendence is the power which lifts religion above its culture and emancipates it from sharing the fate of dying cultures. The prophets saved Hebraic religion from extinction when the Babylonian exile ended the Hebraic culture-religion with its center in the worship of the Temple. They not only saved the life of religion, but raised it to a new purity by their interpretation of the meaning of catastrophe, the redemptive power of vicarious suffering, and the possibility of a redemption which would include more than the fortunes of Israel. In somewhat the same fashion Augustine*s faith disassociated Christianity from a dying Roman world, though the Greek other-worldly elements in Augustine*s faith created the basis for a sacramental rather than prophetic religion of transcendence. Catholic orthodoxy survived the Graeco-Roman culture in the matrix of which it was formed, but in it Isaiah's hope for redemption at the end of history was replaced by a reference toward a realm of transcendence above history, between which and the world of nature-history a sacramental institution mediated. Thus Catholic orthodoxy robbed prophetic religion of its interest in future history and destroyed the sense of the dynamic character of mundane existence.

A vital, prophetic Christianity is consequently forced not only to maintain its independence against naturalism and other-worldliness, but to preserve its purity against sacramental vitiations of its own basic prophetic mythology. The inclination of Christianity to deviate from prophetic religion in terms of sacramental complacency on the one hand and mystic other-worldliness on the other is partly derived from the Greek influence upon its thought and is partly the consequence of its own commendable sharpening of the religious tension in prophetic religion. The religion of Jesus is prophetic religion in which the moral ideal of love and vicarious suffering, elaborated by the second Isaiah, achieves such a purity that the possibility of its realization in history becomes remote. His Kingdom of God is always a possibility in history, because its heights of pure love are organically related to the experience of love in all human life, but it is also an impossibility in history and always beyond every historical achievement. Men living in nature and in the body will never be capable of the sublimation of egoism and the attainment of the sacrificial passion, the complete disinterestedness which the ethic of Jesus demands. The social justice which Amos demanded represented a possible ideal for society. Jesus' conception of pure love is related to the idea of justice as the holiness of God is related to the goodness of men. It transcends the possible and historical. Perhaps this is the reason why the eschatology of later prophecy had ceased to be as unambiguously this-worldly as was that of early prophecy. Certainly the eschatology of Jesus, though this-worldly in frame work, went beyond the possibilities of natural existence ("In the Kingdom of God there will be neither marrying nor giving in marriage"). It might not be unfair to suggest, therefore, that in Christianity the tension between the possibilities of nature and the religio-moral ideal is heightened to a degree which imperils the sober this-worldliness of Hebrew religion. Perhaps the influence of Greek mystery religions upon Christian thought was only a final weight in the balance on the side of dualism, rather than its chief source. This final weight was exerted as early as the thought of Paul ("flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God, neither can corruption inherit incorruption") and continues to increase in the theological elaboration of Christian faith by the early Fathers. The mythical basis of Christian thought prevented it from ever falling into the worst vices of rationalistic dualism, witness the victorious conflict of Christian orthodoxy against Manichaeism and Gnosticism. But it was natural that the highly refined prophetic tensions of the original gospel should become relaxed under the pressure of the years and the effect of rough history upon its delicate resiliency. The consequence of this relaxation is seen in the sacramentalism of Christian orthodoxy in which the natural world (including, unfortunately, the social orders of human history) is celebrated as the handiwork of God; and every natural fact is rightly seen as an image of the transcendent, but wrongly covered so completely with the aura of sanctity as to obscure its imperfections. This sacramentalism is a constitutional disease of mythical religion. The pessimism, asceticism, and mystical absorption which have occasionally seeped into Christian thought and life are not native to it, but derive from rationalistic and mystical religions. Naturalism is another aberration native rather than foreign to the Christian-Hebrew mythos. It maintains the Hebraic idea of the dynamic character of history, but empties its world of references to the transcendent source of life and metning, thus arriving at its self-contained and self-sufficient history. If sacramentalism destroys the horizontal tension between present and future, naturalism vitiates the vertical tension between concrete fact and transcendent source.

A vital Christian faith and life is thus under the necessity of perennially preserving its health against the peril of diseases and corruptions arising out of its own life; and of protecting itself against errors to which non-mythical religions tempt it. Most of its own weaknesses arise when the mythical paradoxes of its faith are resolved; most of the perils from the outside come from the pessimism and dualism of mystical and rational religion. Only a vital Christian faith, renewing its youth in its prophetic origin, is capable of dealing adequately with the moral and social problems of our age; only such a faith can affirm the significance of temporal and mundane existence without capitulating unduly to the relativities of the temporal process. Such a faith alone can point to a source of meaning which transcends all the little universes of value and meaning which "have their day and cease to be" and yet not seek refuge in an eternal world where all history ceases to be significant. Only such a faith can outlast the death of old cultures and the birth of new civilizations, and yet deal in terms of moral responsibility with the world in which cultures and civilizations engage in struggles of death and life.

1. Berdyaev has an interesting word on tine validity of myths: Myth is a reality immeasurably greater than concept. It is high time that we stopped identifying myth with invention, with the illusions of primitive mentality. . Behind the myths are concealed the greatest realities, the original phenomena of the spiritual life. Myth is always concrete and expresses life better than abstract thought can do. . . Myth presents to us the supernatural in the natural — it brings two worlds together symbolically." — (Freedom and the Spirit, p. 7O.)

2. Nathan Soderblom, The Nature of Revelation, p. 1-56.

3. Ibid, p. 61.

4. John Oman, The Natural and the Supernatural, p. 427.

5. Morris Cohen, Reason and Nature, p. 146.

Chapter II: The Ethic of Jesus

The ethic of Jesus commands an all-embracing love because God’s love is like that. It sets itself against all self-regarding impulses, including physical survival, love of possessions, pride, prudential morality, and even family loyalty. Such absolutism and perfectionism leads to the eschatology of an "impossible possibility" whereby God’s kingdom is always coming but never here.

The ethic of Jesus is the perfect fruit of prophetic religion. Its ideal of love has the same relation to the facts and necessities of human experience as the God of prophetic faith has to the world. It is drawn from, and relevant to, every moral experience. It is immanent in life as God is immanent in the world. It transcends the possibilities of human life in its final pinnacle as God transcends the world. It must, therefore, be confused neither with the ascetic ethic of world-denying religions nor with the prudential morality of naturalism, designed to guide good people to success and happiness in this world. It is easily confused with the former because of its uncompromising attitude toward all the impulses of nature; but it never condemns natural impulse as inherently bad. It may be confused with the latter because the transcendent character of its love ideal is implicit rather than explicit in the teachings of Jesus. The ethic proceeds logically from the presuppositions of prophetic religion. In prophetic religion God, as creator and judge of the world, is both the unity which is the ground of existence and the ultimate unity, the good which is, to use Plato's phrase, on the other side of existence. In as far as the world exists at all it is good; for existence is possible only when chaos is overcome by unity and order. But the unity of the world is threatened by chaos, and its meaningfulness is always under the peril of meaninglessness. The ultimate confidence in the meaningfulness of life, therefore, rests upon a faith in the final unity, which transcends the world's chaos as certainly as it is basic to the world's order.

The unity of God is not static, but potent and creative. God is, therefore, love. The conscious impulse of unity between life and life is the most adequate symbol of his nature. All life stands under responsibility to this loving will. In one sense the ethic which results from the command of love is related to any possible ethical system; for all moral demands are demands of unity. Life must not be lived at cross-purposes. The self must establish an inner unity of impulses and desires and it must relate itself harmoniously to other selves and other unities. Thus Hobhouse correctly defines the good as "harmony in the fulfillment of vital capacity."¹ But every naturalistic ethic can demand no more than harmony within chaos, love within the possibilities set by human egoism. A prudential ethic, seeking to relate life to life on the level of nature, is either based upon the illusion that a basic natural harmony between life exists (either because egoism supposedly balances egoism in harmless reciprocity or because rational egoism overcomes conflicts on lower levels of less rational impulse), or it is forced to give sanction to the conflict of egoistic individuals and groups as of the very essence of human character. It is in its attitude toward the force of egoism that the ethic of Jesus distinguishes itself from every naturalistic and prudential ethic. Egoism is not regarded as harmless because imbedded in a preestablished harmony (Adam Smith), nor as impotent because reason can transmute its anarchies into a higher harmony (utilitarianism), nor as the basic reality of human existence (Thomas Hobbes).

The ethic of Jesus does not deal at all with the immediate moral problem of every human life — the problem of arranging some kind of armistice between various contending factions and forces. It has nothing to say about the relativities of politics and economics, nor of the necessary balances of power which exist and must exist in even the most intimate social relationships. The absolutism and perfectionism of Jesus' love ethic sets itself uncompromisingly not only against the natural self-regarding impulses, but against the necessary prudent defenses of the self, required because of the egoism of others. It does not establish a connection with the horizontal points of a political or social ethic or with the diagonals which a prudential individual ethic draws between the moral ideal and the facts of a given situation. It has only a vertical dimension between the loving will of God and the will of man.

Love as the quintessence of the character of God is not established by argument, but taken for granted. It may be regarded as axiomatic in the faith of prophetic religion, On the only occasion on which Jesus makes the matter a subject for argument he declares: "If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?"² This passage is significant because Jesus, true to the insights of prophetic religion, not only discovers symbols of the character of God in man's mundane existence, in the tenderness of parents toward their children, but also because he sees this symbol of God's love among "evil" and not among imperfect men. The contrast in prophetic religion is not between perfection and imperfection, or between the temporal and the eternal, but between good and evil will. But since the evil will of man is not the consequence of pure finiteness, the life of man is not without symbols and echoes of the divine.

In another significant passage the impartiality of nature is made the symbol of divine grace. Since God permits the sun to shine upon the evil and the good and sends the rain upon the just and the unjust, we are to love our enemies.³ The argument used is important not only because an infra-moral aspect of nature is used as a symbol of the supra-moral character of divine grace (thus expressing prophetic imagination at its best), but also because emulation of the character of God is advanced as the only motive of forgiving enemies. Nothing is said about the possibility of transmuting their enmity to friendship through the practice of forgiveness. That social and prudential possibility has been read into the admonition of Jesus by liberal Christianity.

The rigorism of the gospel ethic and its failure to make concessions to even the most inevitable and "natural" self-regarding impulses may best be judged by analyzing the attitude of Jesus toward various natural expressions of human life. Every form of self-assertion is scrutinized and condemned in words which allow of no misinterpretation. The very basis of self-love is the natural will to survive. In man the animal impulse to maintain life becomes an immediate temptation to assert the self against the neighbor. Therefore, in the ethic of Jesus, concern for physical existence is prohibited: "Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat and the body more than raiment? Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? . . . Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithall shall we be clothed? For after all these things do the Gentiles seek; for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things".⁴ The prudent conscience will have an immediately unfavorable reaction to these words. No life can be lived in such unconcern for the physical basis of life. Those who try to make the ethic of Jesus a guide to prudent conduct have, therefore, been anxious to point out that the naïve faith in God's providential care which underlies these injunctions had more relevance in the simple agrarian life of Palestine than in the economic complexities of modern urban existence. But it must be noted that they cannot be followed absolutely even in simple agrarian life. The fact is that this word contains a completely unprudential rigorism in the ethic of Jesus which appears again and again.

The most natural expansion of the self is the expansion through possessions. Therefore the love of possessions as a form of self-assertion meets the same uncompromising rigor. "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth . . . for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. . . . No man can serve two masters. . . . Ye cannot serve God and mammon."⁵ Here the religious orientation of the ethic is perfectly clear. Love of possession is a distraction which makes love and obedience to God impossible. God demands absolute obedience. Thus the rich young ruler who has kept all the commandments is advised, "Go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor."⁶ This word has been used to establish a basis for an ascetic ethic, but it probably was not meant as a rule in the thought of Jesus. It was meant rather as a test of complete devotion to the sovereignty of God. In the same manner the poor widow is praised above those who gave of their superfluity because she "gave all she had."⁷ Somewhat in the same category is the parable of the great supper from which some of the guests excluded themselves because of their preoccupation with the land or the oxen they had bought and the wife one had married.⁸ In all these instances the attitude toward wealth is not determined by any sociomoral considerations, but rather by the conviction that wealth is a source of distraction. The key to Jesus' attitude on wealth is most succinctly stated in the words, "Where your treasure is there will your heart be also."

The most penetrating analyses of the character of self-love are to be found in Jesus' excoriation of pride, particularly the pride of good people. Pride is a subtle form of self-love. It feeds not on the material advantages which more greedy people seek, but upon social approval. His strictures against the Pharisees were partly directed against their social pride. "All their works they do for to be seen of men . . . and love the uppermost rooms at feasts and the chief seats in the synagogues and greetings in the markets and to be called of men, Rabbi, Rabbi."⁹ In the same spirit is the advice to dinner guests, at the house of one of the chief Pharisees "when he marked how they chose out the chief rooms.". . . "But when thou art bidden, go and sit down in the lowest room. . . . For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased: and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted."¹⁰ Incidentally in this case the subjection of egoistic pride is justified not only in religious terms, but in terms of prudential morality. It is pointed out that the effort of the proud to reach exalted positions in society actually results in a loss of respect, while humility leads to social approval: "When he that bade thee cometh, he may say unto thee, Friend, go up higher: then shalt thou have worship in the presence of them that sit at meat with thee."¹¹ This note of prudence is somewhat at variance with the general more purely religious orientation of Jesus ethic. The same emphasis is found in the words "Whosoever will be great among you, shall be your minister: and whosoever of you will be the chiefest, shall be the servant of all."¹² Pride is the form of egoism which corrupts the spirits of all those who possess some excellency of knowledge or achievement which distinguishes them from the crowd, so that they forget their common humanity and their equal unworthiness in the sight of God. But the spiritual pride and self-righteousness which fails to detect the alloy of sin in the relative virtues achieved according to moral codes belongs in yet another category and must be dealt with separately.

Jesus' attitude toward vindictiveness and his injunction to forgive the enemy reveals more clearly than any other element in his ethic his intransigence against forms of self-assertion which have social and moral approval in any natural morality. Resentment against injustice is both the basis, and the egoistic corruption of, all forms of corrective justice. Every communal punishment of murder is a refinement of early customs of blood vengeance. The early community permitted and even encouraged blood vengeance because it felt that the destruction of life within the community was wrong; but it left punishment in the hands of a blood relative because the vindictive passion of the injured family was more potent than the community's more dispassionate disapproval of murder. From the first restraints upon blood vengeance to the last refinements of corrective justice, the egoistic element of vindictiveness remains both an inevitable and a dangerous alloy in the passion for justice. It is inevitable because men never judge injustice so severely as it ought to be judged until their life, or life in their intimate circle, is destroyed by it. It is dangerous because, informed not by a passion for all life, but by attachment to a particular life, it may, and frequently does, do as much injury to life as it seeks to correct. But it remains inevitable however dangerous it may be. Self-assertion when the self is in peril or the victim of injustice expresses itself as a natural impulse even in persons who know its dangers and disapprove the logic which underlies it.

Neither its inevitability nor its moral or social justification in immediate situations qualifies the rigor of Jesus* position. Men are enjoined to "love their enemies," to "forgive, not seven times, but seventy times seven," to resist evil, to turn the other cheek, to go the second mile, to bless them that curse you and do good to them that hate you. In all these injunctions both resistance and resentment are forbidden. The self is not to assert its interests against those who encroach upon it, and not to resent the injustice done to it. The modern pulpit would be saved from much sentimentality if the thousands of sermons which are annually preached upon these texts would contain some suggestions of the impossibility of these ethical demands for natural man in his immediate situations. Nowhere is the ethic of Jesus in more obvious conflict with both the impulses and the necessities of ordinary men in typical social situations.

The justification for these demands is put in purely religious and not in socio-moral terms. We are to forgive because God forgives;¹³ we are to love our enemies because God is impartial in his love. The points of reference are vertical and not horizontal. Neither natural impulses nor social consequences are taken into consideration, it is always possible, of course, that absolute ethical attitudes have desirable social consequences. To do good to an enemy may prompt him to overcome his enmity; and forgiveness of evil may be a method of redemption which commends itself to the most prudent. It must be observed, however, that no appeal to social consequences could ever fully justify these demands of Jesus. Non-resistance may shame an aggressor into goodness, but it may also prompt him to further aggression. Furthermore, if the action is motivated by regard for social consequences it will hardly be pure enough to secure the consequences which are supposed to justify it. Upon that paradox all purely prudential morality is shattered. Therefore Jesus admonishes the disciples who rejoice that "the devils are subject unto us in thy name" not to rejoice in success — "rejoice not that the devils are subject unto you, but rather rejoice because your names are written in heaven."¹⁴ One might paraphrase that injunction as follows: Find your satisfaction not in the triumph over evil in existence, but rather in the conformity of your life to its ultimate essence. Jesus' attitude toward the woman taken in adultery and his confounding word to the self-righteous judges, "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone," shows the relation of his idea of contrition to that of forgiveness. We are to forgive those who wrong society not only because God forgives, but because we know that in the sight of God we also are sinners. This insight into, and emphasis upon, the sins of the righteous is derived from the religious perspective; but it has a very practical relevance to the problems of society. The society which punishes criminals is never so conscious as it might be of the degree to which it is tainted with, and responsible for, the very sins which it abhors and punishes. Yet an unqualified insistence upon guiltlessness as a prerequisite of the right to punish would invalidate every measure required for the maintenance of social order. It is, therefore, impossible to construct a socio-moral policy from this religiomoral insight of Jesus*, as, for instance, Tolstoi attempted in his objection to jails and other forms of social punishment. Society must punish criminals, or at least quarantine them, even if the executors of judgment are self-righteous sinners who do not realize to what degree they are involved in the sins they seek to suppress. But this fact does not invalidate the insight which sees the relative good and the relative evil in both judges and criminals from a high perspective.

The effort to elaborate the religio-moral thought of Jesus into a practical socio-moral or even politico-moral system usually has the effect of blunting the very penetration of his moral insights. When, for instance, liberal Christianity defines the doctrine of non-resistance, so that it becomes merely an injunction against violence in conflict, it ceases to provide a perspective from which the sinful element in all resistance, conflict, and coercion may be discovered. Its application prompts moral complacency rather than contrition, and precisely in those groups in which the evils which flow from self-assertion are most covert. This is the pathos of the espousal of Christian pacifism by the liberal Church, ministering largely to those social groups who have the economic power to be able to dispense with the more violent forms of coercion and therefore condemn them as un-Christian.

The love absolutism in the ethic of Jesus expresses itself in terms of a universalism, set against all narrower forms of human sympathy, as well as in terms of a perfectionism which maintains a critical vigor against the most inevitable and subtle forms of self-assertion. The universalistic element appears in the injunctions which require that the life of the neighbor be affirmed beyond the bounds set by natural human sympathy. Love within the bounds of consanguinity and intimate community is regarded as devoid of special merit: "For if ye love them which love you, what thanks have ye? Do not even the publicans the same ?"¹⁵ An all-embracing love is enjoined because God's love is like that. In Professor Torrey's recent translation of the four gospels, Matt. 5:48 is rendered in words which fit in perfectly with the general logic of Jesus' thought: "Be therefore all-including in your good-will, as your Heavenly Father includes all."¹⁶

The universalism in Jesus' ethic has affinities with Stoic universalism, but there are also important differences between them. In Stoicism life beyond the narrow bonds of class, community, and race is to be affirmed because all life reveals a unifying divine principle. Since the divine principle is reason, the logic of Stoicism tends to include only the intelligent in the divine community. An aristocratic condescension, therefore, corrupts Stoic universalismn. In the thought of Jesus men are to be loved not because they are equally divine, but because God loves them equally; and they are to be forgiven (the highest form of love) because all (the self included) are equally far from God and in need of his grace. This difference between Stoicism and the gospel ethic is important because it marks a real distinction between pantheism and prophetic religion. The ultimate moral demands upon man can never be affirmed in terms of the actual facts of human existence. They can be affirmed only in terms of a unity and a possibility, a divine reality which transcends human existence. The order of human existence is too imperiled by chaos, the goodness of man too corrupted by sin, and the possibilities of man too obscured by natural handicaps to make human order and human virtue and human possibilities solid bases of the moral imperative.

The Universalistic note in the thought of Jesus is reinforced by his critical attitude toward the family. This attitude is particularly significant because he was not an ascetic in his family ethic. On the contrary, he had a sacramental conception of the family relation. Yet family loyalty is seen as a possible hindrance to a higher loyalty. When apprised of the presence of the members of his family he answers ruthlessly: "Who is my mother, or my brethren? . . . For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother."¹⁷ In the same spirit is his advice to the young man who desired to withhold his discipleship until he could perform the last act of filial piety, "Let the dead bury the dead";¹⁸ and also the uncompromising words "He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me"¹⁹ (given an even more ruthless form in Luke 14 :26, "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple"). Surely this is not an ethic which can give us specific guidance in the detailed problems of social morality where the relative claims of family, community, class, and nation must be constantly weighed. One is almost inclined to agree with Karl Barth that this ethic "is not applicable to the problems of contemporary society nor yet to any conceivable society." It is oriented by only one vertical religious reference, to the will of God; and the will of God is defined in terms of all-inclusive love. Under the perspective of that will the realities of the world of human egoism, and the injustices and tyrannies arising from it, are fully revealed. We see the actual facts more clearly and realize that the world of nature is also a world of sin. But there is no advice on how we may hold the world of sin in check until the coming of the Kingdom of God. The ethic of Jesus may offer valuable insights to and sources of criticism for a prudential social ethic which deals with present realities; but no such social ethic can be directly derived from a pure religious ethic.
 

If there are any doubts about the predominant vertical religious reference of Jesus' ethic they ought to be completely laid by a consideration of his attitude on the ethical problem of rewards. Here the full rigorism and the non-prudential character of Jesus' ethic are completely revealed. Obedience to God, in the teachings of Jesus, must be absolute and must not be swayed by any ulterior considerations. Alms are not to be done before men and prayers are not to be said in the marketplace, so that the temptation to gain social approval through religious piety and good works may be overcome.²⁰ Good deeds from which mutual advantages may be secured are to be eschewed: "But when thou makest a meal, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and thou shalt be blessed; for they cannot recompense thee."²¹ The service of God is to be performed not only without hope of any concrete or obvious reward, but at the price of sacrifice, abnegation, and loss. "He that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me."²² The sovereignty of God is pictured as a pearl of great price or like a treasure hid in a field which to buy men sell all they have.²³ If any natural gift or privilege should become a hindrance to the spirit of perfect obedience to God it must be rigorously denied: "If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than, having two eyes, to be cast into hell fire."²⁴ In all of these emphases the immediate and the concrete advantages which may flow from right conduct are either not considered at all or their consideration is definitely excluded. The ethic demands an absolute obedience to the will of God without consideration of those consequences of moral action which must be the concern of any prudential ethic.

It must be admitted that this rigor is seemingly qualified by certain promises of reward. These rewards belong in two categories. The one is ultimate rewards "in the resurrection of the just." The others are probably a concession to a prudential morality. The merciful shall obtain mercy (does this mean from God or from man?). Men will be measured by the measure with which they mete and if they do not judge they will not be judged (Matt. 7, 1). This may mean that God will deal with men according to their attitude toward their fellow men (a consideration suggested in the parable of the last judgment); but it may also mean that Jesus is calling attention to the reciprocal character of all social life where censoriousness is met by a critical attitude, and where pride actually results in the disrespect of one's fellows, while humility elicits respect: ("whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted").²⁵ In the same category is the ethical paradox which is so basic to the ethics of Jesus: "He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake, shall find it."²⁶ This paradox merely calls attention to the fact that egoism is self-defeating, while self-sacrifice actually leads to a higher form of self-realization. Thus self-love is never justified, but self-realization is allowed as the unintended but inevitable consequence of unselfish action.

This note in the teachings of Jesus brings it into a position of relevance with a social and prudential ethic. It has even established points of contact between the ethic of Jesus and a utilitarian ethic in which the conflict between love and self-love is supposedly resolved by the achievement of a form of selfishness which includes "the greatest good of the greatest number." It must be remembered, however, that the actual world of human nature and history does not by any means guarantee self-realization through self-sacrifice unless self-realization is conceived in terms quite distinct from the ordinary will-to-survive in physical life. History may bestow immortality of fame upon a martyr, but it certainly does not guarantee that an honest man will prosper because of his honesty or an unselfish man succeed because of his generosity. There are always such possibilities in the world because the human world contains symbols of ultimate unity amidst its chaos. But it is not a world of pure unity and the imperative of love leads to the destruction of the self as well as to its higher fulfillment.

Possibly Jesus thought of all these rewards only in eschatological terms. He may have meant to say only that God would be merciful to the merciful, would exalt the humble, and would establish the life of those who had lost it for the Kingdom*s sake. Most of the promises of reward in the teachings of Jesus are clearly in this category of ultimate rewards. Those who have left house and family are promised "manifold more in this present time, and in the world to come life everlasting."²⁷ In the parable of the talents the obedient servant is set in "authority over ten cities."²⁸ Those who are reviled are given the promise and hope of a great reward in heaven.²⁹ The rich young man is promised "treasure in heaven" if his obedience is complete enough to prompt him to sell all he has.³⁰

All these promises of an ultimate reward are in no way in conflict with the rigor of the gospel ethic. They merely prove that even the most uncompromising ethical system must base its moral imperative in an order of reality and not merely in a possibility. Somewhere, somehow, the unity of the world must be or become an established fact and not merely a possibility, and actions which flow from its demands must be in harmony and not in conflict with reality. Such assurances may always become the basis of a "transcendental hedonism" and persuade the faithful to seek ultimate rewards by courting momentary loss. But this attitude toward ultimate rewards does not discredit a religion which promises them. It merely proves that human egoism can corrupt even the most ultimate hopes and make them the basis of self-seeking. It is as pathetic as it is natural that human sin should express itself finally in an effort to corrupt the ultimate hope of the human spirit.

The eschatological character of the promise of rewards in the gospel ethic naturally raises the question of the relation of this ethic to eschatology. If by an eschatological ethic is meant an "interims" ethic, an ethic to be followed in the short period before the coming of the Kingdom of God, an ethic which regards the affairs of this world with indifference and contempt because the end of the world is imminent, the ethic of Jesus is definitely not in this category. The note of apocalyptic urgency is significantly lacking in many of the passages in which the religio-ethical rigor is most uncompromising.³¹ The motive advanced for fulfilling the absolute demands is simply that of obedience to God or emulation of his nature, and there is no suggestion that the world should be held in contempt because it will soon pass away. In St. Paul the interims motif is more pronounced, particularly in his family ethic.³² Confidence in the imminent destruction of the present world order prompts him to counsel indifference toward relationships the significance of which depends upon its continuance. Jesus' attitude toward the family is entirely different. It is, on the whole, sacramental ("what God hath joined let no man put asunder"). Where it approaches the ascetic, as, for instance, in the identification of lust with adultery, the rigorous note has no relation to the apocalyptic element. It is merely a consistent part of the entire emphasis upon absolute purity of motive in the total system of thought.

There is, nevertheless, an eschatological element in, and even basis for, the ethic of Jesus. The ethical demands made by Jesus are incapable of fulfillment in the present existence of man. They proceed from a transcendent and divine unity of essential reality, and their final fulfillment is possible only when God transmutes the present chaos of this world into its final unity. The logic of this thought is obviously under the influence of the later apocalypses of Jewish prophecy in which the hope for a "good time" and a "fulfilled time" becomes transmuted into the expectation of the end of time. These later apocalypses were the consequence of a logic inherent in the moral life, a logic which recognizes that the ultimate moral demands upon the human spirit proceed from a unity which transcends all conceivable possibilities in the order of nature and history in which human life moves. Placing the final fulfillment at the end of time and not in a realm above temporality is to remain true to the genius of prophetic religion and to state mythically what cannot be stated rationally. If stated rationally the world is divided between the temporal and the eternal and only the eternal forms above the flux of temporality have significance. To state the matter mythically is to do justice to the fact that the eternal can only be fulfilled in the temporal. But since myth is forced to state a paradoxical aspect of reality in terms of concepts connoting historical sequence, it always leads to historical illusions. Jesus, no less than Paul, was not free of these historical illusions. He expected the coming of the Messianic kingdom in his lifetime; at least that seems to have been his expectation before the crisis in his ministry. Even when he faced the cross rather than triumph he merely postponed the ultimate triumph to a later future, though to a rather proximate one.³³

Apocalypticism in terms of a specific interpretation of history may thus be regarded as the consequence and not the cause of Jesus' religion and ethic. The apocalypse is a mythical expression of the impossible possibility under which all human life stands. Kingdom of God is always at hand in the sense impossibilities are really possible, and lead to new actualities in given moments of history. Nevertheless every actuality of history reveals itself, after the event as only an approximation of the ideal; and the Kingdom of God is therefore not here. It is in fact always coming but never here.

The historical illusions which resulted inevitably from this mythical statement of the situation in which the human spirit finds itself do not destroy the truth in the myth; no more than the discovery that the fall of man was not actual history destroys the truth in the story of the fall. Nevertheless it must be admitted that the ethical rigor of the early church was maintained through the hope of the second coming of Christ and the establishment of his Kingdom. When the hope of the parousia waned the rigor of the Christian ethic was gradually dissipated and the Church, forced to come to terms with the relativities of politics and economics and the immediate necessities of life made unnecessary compromises with these relativities which frequently imperiled the very genius of prophetic religion. But the mistakes which resulted, both from illusions about the course of history and from the adjustments which had to be made when the illusions vanished, do not invalidate the basic insights of prophetic religion. They merely present Christian ethics afresh with the problem of compromise, the problem of creating and maintaining harmonies of life in the world in terms of the possibilities of the human situation, while yet at the same time preserving the indictment upon all human life of the impossible possibility, the law of love.

As I understand it, the two Rauschenbush lectures previous to this one took opposite views on the so-called apostasy of the Church after Constantine from the ethic of Jesus. In one³⁴ it was maintained that the rigor of the early Church should have been maintained and must at all costs be reestablished. This thesis does not recognize to what degree the particular ethical strategy of the early Church depended upon an illusion in regard to history. In the other³⁵ the compromises of the Church are interpreted as merely necessary adaptations of the Christian conscience to new situations. Dr. Case declares: "There is a wide range of social tasks that were but dimly, if at all, perceived in ancient times. However loyal the individual may to the Christian heritage, he frequently finds it deficient as a guide to all his conduct when he is faced with the more crucial issues of the present. Even the problems of personal conduct have taken on many new aspects in the history of social evolution since the time of Jesus."³⁶ The unique rigor of the gospel is thus attributed to the peculiar circumstances of time and place — agrarian simplicity, for instance, as contrasted with the industrial complexities of our day. Both interpretations flow from the same illusion of liberalism, that we are dealing with a possible and prudential ethic in the gospel. In the one case its qualified application is recommended in spite of the fact that every moment of our existence reveals its impossibility. In the other case, necessary compromises are regarded merely as adjustments to varying ages and changing circumstances. The crucial problem of Christian ethics is obscured in either case.

The full dimension of human life includes not an impossible ideal, but realities of sin and evil which are more than simple imperfections and which prove that the ideal is something more than the product of a morbidly sensitive religious fantasy. Anything less than perfect love in human life is destructive of life. All human life stands under an impending doom because it does not live by the law of love. Egoism is always destructive. The wages of sin is death. The destruction of our contemporary civilization through its justice and through the clash of conflicting national wills is merely one aspect and one expression of the destruction of sin in the world.

Confronted with this situation humanity always faces a double task. The one is to reduce the anarchy of the world to some kind of immediately sufferable order and unity; and the other is to set these tentative and insecure unities and achievements under the criticism the ultimate ideal. When they are not thus challenged, what is good in them becomes evil and each tentative harmony becomes the cause of a new anarchy. With Augustine we must realize that the peace of the world is gained by strife. That does not justify us either in rejecting such a tentative peace or in accepting it as final. The peace of the city of God can use and transmute the lesser and insecure peace of the city of the world; but that can be done only if the peace of the world is not confused with the ultimate peace of God.

1. L. T. Hobhouse, The Rational Good, p. 161.

2. Matt. 7:11.

3. Matt. 5:45.

4. Matt. 6:25-32.

5. Matt. 6:19-24.

6. Matt. 19:21.

7. Mark 12:44.

8. Luke 14:16-24.

9. Matt. 23:5-7.

10. Luke 14:7-11.

11. Luke 14:10.

12. Mark 10:43.

13. Matt. 18:23.

14. Luke 10:20.

15. Matt. 5:46.

16. Charles Cutler Torrey, The Four Gospels, p. 12.

17. Mark 3:32-34.

18. Luke 9:60.

19. Matt. 10:37.

20. Matt. 6:1-6.

21. Luke 14:13-15.

22. Matt. 10:38.

23. Matt. 13:44-46.

24. Matt. 18:9.

25. Luke 14:11.

26. Matt. 10:39.

27. Luke 18:30.

28. Luke 19:17.

29. Matt. 5:11.

30. Luke 18:22.

31. Cf. Matt. 5:29; 6:20; 6:31; 10:37; 12:48; Luke 18:22.

32. I Corr. 7:27-29.

33. Cf Matt. 10:23. "Ye shall not have gone through the cities of Israel, until the Son of man be come."

34. Charles Clayton Morrison, The Social Gospel and the Christian Cultus, ch. 6.

35. Shirley Jackson Case, The Social Triumph of the Ancient Church.

36. Op. Cit., p. 12.

Chapter III: The Christian Conception of Sin

Prophetic Christianity has been able to hold in paradoxical juxtaposition Jesus’ unqualified love commandment and the fact of sin and evil by reliance on the myth of the Fall, which focuses on the root of man’s sin as his pretensions of being God.

The measure of Christianity’s success in gauging the full dimension of human life is given in its love perfectionism, on the one hand, and in its moral realism and pessimism, on the other. In liberal Christianity there is an implicit assumption that human nature has the resources to fulfill what the gospel demands. The Kantian axiom, "I ought, therefore I can," is accepted as basic to all analyses of the moral situation. In classical Christianity the perfectionism of the gospel stands in a much more difficult relation to the estimate of human resources. The love commandment stands in juxtaposition to the fact of sin. It helps, in fact, to create the consciousness of sin. When, as in utilitarian doctrine, the moral ideal is stated in terms of a wise egoism, able to include the interests of others in those of the self, there is no occasion for the consciousness of sin. All human actions are simply on a lower or higher scale of rational adjustment of interest to interest and life to life.

The sense of sin is peculiarly the product of religious imagination, as the critics of religion quite rightly maintain. It is the consequence of measuring life in its total dimension and discovering the self both related to and separated from life in its essence. The consciousness of sin has no meaning to the mind of modernity because in modern secularism reality is merely a flux of temporal events. In prophetic religion the flux of the finite world is both a revelation and veiling of the eternal creative principle and will. Every finite event points to something beyond itself in two directions, to a source from which it springs and an end to which it moves. Prophetic religion believes, in other words, in a God who is both the creator and the fulfillment of life.

The human spirit is set in this dimension of depth in such a way that it is able to apprehend, but not to comprehend, the total dimension. The human mind is forced to relate all finite events to causes and consummations beyond themselves. It thus constantly conceives all particular things in their relation to the totality of reality, and can adequately apprehend totality only in terms of a principle of unity "beyond, behind, and above the passing flux of things" (Whitehead). But this same human reason is itself imbedded in the passing flux, a tool of a finite organism, the instrument of its physical necessities, and the prisoner of the partial perspectives of a limited time and place. The consequence is that it is always capable of envisaging possibilities of order, unity, and harmony above and beyond the contingent and arbitrary realities of its physical existence; but it is not capable (because of its finiteness) of incarnating, all the higher values which it discerns; nor even of adequately defining, the unconditioned good which it dimly apprehends as the ground and goal of all its contingent values.

This paradoxical relation of finitude and infinity, and consequently of freedom and necessity, is the mark of the uniqueness of the human spirit in this creaturely world. Man is the only mortal animal who knows that he is mortal, a fact which proves that in some sense he is not mortal. Man is the only creature imbedded in the flux of finitude who knows that this is his fate; which proves that in some sense this is not his fate. Thus when life is seen in its total dimension, the sense of God and the sense of sin are involved in the same act of self-consciousness; for to be self-conscious is to see the self as a finite object separated from essential reality; but also related to it, or there could be no knowledge of separation. If this religious feeling is translated into moral terms it becomes the tension between the principle of love and the impulse of egoism, between the obligation to affirm the ultimate units of lifc and the urge to establish the ego against all competing forms of life. The Christian approach to the problem of sin is, however, not exhausted in the recognition of mere finiteness. That recognition is in some sense involved in all moral and philosophical theory. All modern moral theory may be briefly described as complacent finiteness. The motto of modernity is succinctly given in the words of that typical spirit of the Renaissance, Cosimo de Medici: "You follow infinite objects, I finite ones. You place your ladders in the heavens and I on earth that I may not seek so high or fall so low." The more classical culture religions, such as Neo-Platonism and Buddhism, are characterized by a tragic sense of finitude in which sin and evil identified with temporality; and salvation is conceived as an escape from the temporal to the eternal world, escape which necessarily involves the destruction of individual personality, since individuality is the product of finite existence. The conception of evil in religion is more complex than either of these.

Unlike modern secularism prophetic religion does not accept finitude complacently, for it recognizes that reality is more than flux. If it were not more than that there could be no meaningful existence; for the flux of the world is full of evil and every higher principle of order to which the soul might attach itself, in the effort to rescue meaning from chaos, is discovered upon analysis, to have new possibilities of evil in it. The high values of history may be some tentative unity like that of the nation, not high or inclusive enough to become the ultimate principle of order, and therefore a possible source of a new anarchy; or they may be a more ultimate conception of order, like that of the community of mankind, which is corrupted as soon as it is incarnated, since the instruments of its realization are always specific men, groups, and nations, who are bound to introduce their partial perspectives and imperial lusts into the dream of the ideal.

While one must have considerable sympathy with modernity when it declaims with Cosimo de Medici, "We will not aim so high or fall so low" when one surveys the havoc wrought by morbid religion, yet this sympathy is dissipated when it is recognized that it is not within the province of the human spirit to choose qualified goals in order to escape the intolerable tension of the unqualified. Every such effort merely results in transmuting some qualified end (such as democracy, the League of Nations, honesty in business, liberty, etc.) into an unqualified one. Man as a creature of both finitude and the eternal cannot escape his problem simply by disavowing the ultimate. The eternal is involved in every moral judgment. The moral theories of modern culture will be found, upon close examination, to deal with the unconditioned implicitly while they deny its validity explicitly. Does not all modern moral theory proceed upon the assumption that human reason will be able to arrive at higher and higher standards of impartial judgment and harmonies of conduct? While ostensibly glorying in the finitude of man, it really gives itself to the uncritical faith that human reason is slowly approaching a state of discarnate perfection; and that an adequate education will ultimately allow men to judge issues