I. The Preacher's Theme. By The REV. HENRY COLLIN MINTON, PAGK II.-Ten Years of German Theology. By PROF. D. B. SCHNEDER, D.D. 316 III.-Poetic Points of View. By The REV. EDWARD S. BROMER, D.D. 339 IV.—“The Faith of a Layman." By The REV. W. D. HAPPEL, Ph.D. 384 V.-Contemporary Religious and Theological Thought in Great Britain and America. By The REV. A. S. WEBER, D.D. VI.-Contemporary Sociology. By PROF. A. V. HIESTER. Ramsay: The Cities of St. Paul; Their Influence on His Life and Thought; Corpus Schwenckfeldianorum; Faulkner: Eras- mus; Nash: The Atoning Life; Lindsay: Gloria Christi; Zwemer I.-Education and Pessimism. By The REV. J. SPANGLER KIEFFER, II.-Christianity and the Family. By J. MAX HARK, D.D. III. The Early Catechisms of the Reformed Church in the United THE REFORMED CHURCH REVIEW No. 1.-JANUARY-1908. I. THE MYSTICAL AND THE ETHICAL. BY PROF. CHRISTOPHER NOSS, D.D. God is Spirit, conception preThe compleThe one thing It is one of the commonplaces that Christianity is an ethical religion. Compared with other religions of the highest type it is characterized by its superlatively ethical conception of God. The supreme divine attribute is love. Personality, Character. It is only when this vails that the Incarnation is at all thinkable. mentary truth is that of the dignity of man. in all the universe that has value in the sight of God is character. To make this possible the Creator endowed man with freedom, a truly godlike, creative power. It is because man has this power of initiative and is not in all things blindly and unresistingly impelled by God's will that he can be the object of God's love and can reflect that love in his own nature. Christlike character is the end and aim of all existence, and in its attainment will be found the complete solution of all problems. Vigorous ethical life is accordingly the bearer of true religion. But religion is more than morals. There is something in Christian experience that is not reducible to ethical terms. When the specifically religious element is suppressed there ensues a degeneration to rationalism and, finally, materialism; for the spirit that asserts the absolute sufficiency of the will is akin to the spirit that enthrones the reason, and in the end both are overcome by the flesh. If St. Paul were to preach on Beacon Hill in Boston as he preached at Athens he would perhaps say: "In all things I perceive that ye are very practical." In America the hero is not the philosopher or the poet but "the man that does things." In the religious life too intense practical activity has taken the place occupied by contemplation and prayer in former ages. The Andachtsbücher of our great-grandfathers are becoming not only in language but also in sentiment as strange and unfamiliar as the hymns and homilies of Ephræm Syrus. Our Japanese brethren shudder at our cool, calculating conferences on the best methods of doing Christian work and some of them declare that American ministers of the Gospel are neglecting their proper spiritual functions and attending instead to the administration of multitudinous societies and the building of big churches. What we need is not less practicality but more spirituality. It is time for us to learn that to be exclusively and excessively practical is to be profoundly impractical. The same tendency is revolutionizing dogmatics. The business of the dogmatician is to define a preachable theology, and the times demand practical preaching. So the ethicizaThe doctrine of tion of the dogma is the order of the day. the two natures in Christ is being superseded by a theory that reduces the unity and harmony of God and man in his person to terms of moral perfection. The atonement is set forth as a moral process. The doctrines of original sin, justification by faith and the like are dismissed with the summary verdict: "Unethical." The theological world can never again be what it was before this revolution began any more than Europe could restore pre-Napoleonic conditions in the political sphere. In the painful process of house-cleaning through which we have passed quantities of battered furniture and useless heirlooms, obsolete metaphysics and scholastic speculations, have been removed never to be restored. This demand for the ethicization of the dogma has a certain justification. Every doctrine must be understood and interpreted in its ethical bearings. We have to eliminate as extraneous and nonessential not only those elements in doctrine that are really unethical but also those that have nothing to do with ethical interests, that is, do not vitally affect the development of Christian character. This, however, does not mean that we are to resolve piety into morals. Religion must be thoroughly ethical; but religion is not ethics. In the usual division of systematic theology (apologetics, dogmatics, ethics) dogmatics will always remain the dominant discipline; for it determines the character of the other two. Dogmatics analyzes and clarifies the essential contents of Christian faith; it sets forth specifically Christian principles. Apologetics deals with the relations of the Christian life to secular thought; ethics with the relations of the Christian life to conduct in the world. It has been customary to give apologetics the first place and ethics the last. There is more reason for arranging the three disciplines in the reverse order, -ethics, dogmatics, apologetics. The practical defense of the faith against its philosophic and scientific foes must wait until one is quite in the clear as to the contents of the faith; and principial apologetics, or the determination of the theory of knowledge and the relation of dogmatics to other sciences, ought to be reduced to the simplest possible terms, for the reason that all introductions should be brief and not delay more than is necessary the progress of the student in medias res. So too practical ethics properly follows dogmatics; but principial ethics has a better right to the first place than principial apologetics. Schleiermacher, beginning his dogmatics with "postulates from ethics," indicates the right order of thought. As Christianity is much more an experience than a theory, it is but reasonable that systematic theology should the Romans. begin and end in ethics. Such is the plan of the Epistle to But the central message of that incomparable document is a dogma, not a canon. The vital theme is what God does for us, not what we ought to do for God. The so-called "new theology " has allowed the ethicizing tendency to run to extremes. It is hyper-ethical. It relegates to the limbo of "superstitions" such ideas as those of the power of sin in the subconscious reaches of the soul, the absolutely superhuman element in the person of Christ, the reality of the atonement as effecting a change in the relation of God to man, the objective efficacy of the sacraments, and everything that is not reducible to terms of human will and consciousness. Every attempt of the orthodox theologian to maintain the thesis that "the Christian life is something broader and deeper than its manifestations in conscious experience" is met with charges of imparting into dogmatics. Greek metaphysics, medieval realism, a dualistic view of the world or a conception of the grace of God as a magical force. The classical exponent of this type of thought in the modern world is Unitarianism. The name ought rather to be Humanitarianism. For the unity of God is really not the point at issue. That is, in itself, an utterly barren abstraction. Rev. Dr. Edward Everett Hale's recent utterance no doubt expresses the real animus of so-called Unitarianism. "We affirm that the doing of the will of the Master is the vital thing, and that beliefs about the nature of Christ are unimportant in comparison with practical obedience to his precepts." If this is the platform of the Unitarian churches they are, properly speaking, ethical societies and hardly have any right to complain when religious bodies show indisposition to admit them to their conferences. In saying this we are not unmindful of the fact that the Unitarians have been and are still in the van of moral progress and social reform. A tree attacked by a fatal disease does not immediately cease to bear fruit; often it exhausts its last energies in producing an extraordinary yield before it dies. |