AMERICAN CHURCH

REVIEW.

CHRISTIAN FAITH AND THEOLOGY.

There is no more marked feature in the religion of our time, than the tendency to divorce Christian truth from the theological formularies in which it has long been embodied. Undoubtedly it shows in some of its shapes a decay of faith; but when we carefully study the fact on all sides, such a solution cannot wholly explain it. It appears not only in writers like Matthew Arnold, who find in Hebrew or Christian "literature " no dogma whatever, but in Protestant bodies, hitherto the stoutest defenders of their own confessions; in the gradual decline of tenets, like those of predestination and reprobation, so often the war-cry of sects after the reformation; in movements toward the harmony of old school and new; in the larger place given in theological education to doctrinal history, above the systems of one school or time; in the general indifference to controversial preaching; and even, I say it gladly, in the "unconscious philosophy," (for the "philosophy of the unconscious" plays a larger part in our Christianity than we know), of the stiffest Anglican, who calls himself the champion of dogmatic unity, but will give up all articles and retreat to the "Nicene basis." We must surely see, therefore, in such a change the legitimate, though unripe fruit of Church his

tory. It means that Protestantism has through a long, harsh experience reached a further step, and is learning its need of a unity of Christendom, which can never come out of rival metaphysical systems. That unity is far from an accomplished fact. It can never be found in the surrender of all creed. But it is, as I hold, to come through His Providence who guides the truth, out of the earnest struggle, which is the distinctive feature of our age. In such a view of the tendency, a sound scholar can neither accept the notion of those who reject dogma, nor the equal error of those who will cure our scepticism by reviving the dogmatic tyranny which begot the revolt against it. The want of our Church education to-day is a thorough study of the mutual relations of revealed faith and theological science. It is an intricate subject; but even a clear outline may reconcile honest thinkers, and perhaps help to cure some common mistakes of our Anglican theory.

We must then, at the outset, look at the Christian truth in each sphere of primitive faith and theological inquiry; for we can only thus know their harmony, and the cause of our misconceptions. It is the ground, from which we begin all such study, that the religion of Christ was given in the form of a living history. Revelation contains the positive truth of Him, who came the divine Saviour of mankind. But it was no system of speculative wisdom concerning the nature of God, the mental or moral powers, such as is taught in the schools of science; it was the declaration of one fact, the redemption of men from sin and their fellowship as children of God. All the doctrines, which are the teaching of Christianity, are to be viewed in the light of this central truth of redemption, as it opens in its manifold relations the knowledge of God as a Father, our moral condition, our duty, and our destiny. And as it is thus in its essence no philosophy, but a practical and living Gospel, so it is embodied for us in the New Testament, in that record which always preserves it as real history. We read its word as it fell from his own lips; as it was incarnated in his own sinless person. That creed, which he gave as the inheritance of the Church, the name of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, was no metaphysical formula, but a seal of the faith into which all were to be " discipled "

and baptized, as children of one Father and brethren of one household. Nor is this conception of primitive Christianity less plain, as we pass to the church of the Acts and Epistles. There is the same simple, living unity of belief; and although we see in the Pauline Epistles as well as elsewhere, the signs of an organized body, an "Apostles' teaching and fellowship," yet there is no theology in any just meaning of the word. The faith is no tradition in the sense of a digest of doctrines, of articles and confessions; the epistles are the current historic writing of the early church, and to be studied in their connection with the life of that age, if we would know their worth to us.

Such is the view of the Christian faith which divides us at the threshold from any who make it in its essence the revelation of a system of abstract doctrines. The difference is at the root. The one view changes it into a speculative theology in its original substance, or a traditional summa of the Church. This makes it more than doctrine, a divine history; no "Gospel of notions," but the Word in the conscience and life of men. The facts of our sonship, our sin, our redemption, of the incarnate life and grace of Christ are the same now as when they were given in the sacred history. The Catholicity of faith lies in the character of such a truth; for only thus can it be held "everywhere, always and by all." It cannot rest on council or creed as its ultimate ground. And it is because this fact is forgotten, that the Scriptures have been made, instead of the book of divine history, the repertory of proof texts. I need not dwell on examples. Thus the Epistle to the Romans has been so often distorted into a system of "election" in the Calvinistic sense, or diluted into an Arminian theory of contingency," when if read in the light of true historic criticism, it unfolds the Catholic truth of the calling of redeemed men into one household of God in Christ, instead of a little race-election in Abraham. Every doctrine, whether of the Trinity, the atonement, regeneration, eternal life and death, has been in one school or another taken out of this living connection of Scripture, and identified with a system. If there be one fruitful result of Biblical science, it is that it has taught us to read the New Testament not as an arsenal of weapons for the defense of our later structures

of doctrine or church polity, but in its own light as the history of a truth more divine than all "bodies of divinity."

We can thus pass to the relation of revealed faith to theology. It is the necessary demand of the Christian intellect, as it studies on · manifold sides the problems of the nature of God, of our human being, of eternal life, that it must have its scientific exposition. But a Christian theology has thus within itself two elements. It can never be a mere system of speculation, but must view such questions always in relation to its own central divine truth. Yet it must present this truth in the forms of human reasoning, and therefore it must be mingled with the philosophic conceptions and methods of its time. As such, therefore, theological science is a history, which we are to trace through the whole development of the Christian church. It is not a fixed, unchanging revelation, nor is it the arbitrary dogma of an ecclesiastical body. But it is not on this account a mass of confused, warring opinions; it is the exposition of the one Word of God, as it has passed through the successive phases of Christian thought. It obeys the law of orderly science. There are thus certain guiding conditions of doctrinal growth. In the first place there is an order of development in the character of revealed truth itself. Theology begins with the doctrine of the Incarnation, the nature of God in Christ. Its next step is the study of the nature of man in his original powers and his sinful condition. This view must lead to the doctrine of redemption, the relation of God to man in the work of a mediator; and it is last completed in the relation of man to this revelation of grace. In this light the modern divisions of the science; theology, anthropology, soteriology are verified by the study of doctrinal history. I shall only beg leave to differ in one weighty point. Our last division, which, as I shall show, belongs to Protestant thought, should be Christian ethics, embracing the whole domain of personal faith and the connection of the spiritual life with the church as a social body. But this order of thought, again, has its expression in the successive periods of the church. Theology finds in the peculiar genius and culture of each the soil of its growth. The subtle, speculative mind of the Greek, educated in the ideas of Plato; the practical life of the Latin, nursed in the atmosphere of law; the scholastic age, under the mastery of Aristotelian

logic; the freer, more inward spirit of Protestantism give their stamp to the result. We see in each only a part in the whole of this theological process; in each one-sided modes of inquiry and imperfect gains. But there is no less essential unity. That unity is in the living faith of the Church; and in the attainment, age after age, of clearer and more completed knowledge, as the false dogmatisms, the partial systems are sloughed off, while no positive truth is lost. Such is the true law of historic growth. It is not, as with Mr. Newman, the development of a mass of uncritical tradition in the Roman communion; a theory which can twist a few sentences of Scripture into the worship of Mary, or consecrate any fancies of the Fathers as Catholic verities. But it is the sound, reasonable study of the mind of the Church, its struggles, its patient inquiries, its triumphs; one unbroken commentary on the mind of Christ.

Such a view of the character of Christian theology we are now to verify in a rapid look at its history. It was the necessity of the Church, as it passed after the Apostolic time out of its unreflective childhood to riper thought, to come into contact with the existing ideas of Jewish and Gentile culture. There were speculative errors, such as we trace already in the Epistles to the Colossians and that of St. John, soon to ripen into full grown Gnostic schools; there were the strange admixtures of the Greek mind with the East in the Neo-Platonism of the time. It was in conflict with these that the truth of Christ must strive, and win its just triumph over the intellect of the world, as well as over its conscience and life. Yet it is not at once we find the systematic fruits of such a growth. The earliest literature, beside the formation of the N. T. Canon, is seen in little else than the simple letters of the Apostolic Fathers. Nor do we have the upbuilding in any proper sense of a theology in the thinkers of the next period, like Clement, Origen, Tertullian, who were mainly busied with apologetics against the heathen philosophy, or in exposing the fantastic speculations, which had ripened in the Gnostic sects. These are the Stromata, to use the phrase of Clement, out of which there soon arises the clearer view of the fundamental ideas of a Christian theology. The true symbol of that unity which the church had reached is to be found in the Apostles'